A Warning About Crash Diets and Diet Pills for Those With Hepatitis and Liver Disease

The recommended way to lose weight is to adopt a healthy, balanced diet and to exercise regularly. It is easy to be tempted to take a shortcut to this goal via the use of crash diets or diet pills. This is definitely not recommended. These mass-market solutions may produce serious adverse, or perhaps even fatal, consequences in a person with liver disease. Many fad diets emphasize one particular category of nutrient, say protein, or even just one specific type of food, like grapefruit, to the exclusion of everything else. A healthy person’s liver might be able to tolerate this approach, but a damaged liver often cannot. The nutritional imbalance that an ill-advised fad diet can create can easily throw a weakened liver into failure and land a person in the hospital. The same applies to some diet pills. Remember, everything that is ingested eventually has to be processed by the liver. Diet pills may add to the stress of an already burdened liver, thereby increasing the likelihood that a person’s condition will worsen rather than improve.  And, one final point -  despite spending approximately 33 billion dollars annually on commercial weight loss products, there has been an increase in the prevalence of obesity in the United States over the last two decades.  This underscores the point that these products do not work and should not be tried.

All contents of this article are Copyright © Melissa Palmer, MD

Melissa Palmer, MD is the author of " Dr. Melissa Palmer's Guide of Hepatitis and Liver Disease". (Published 2004. Penguin Putnam).

Dr. Palmer is an internationally renowned hepatologist who has been practicing medicine since 1985. Prior to 2012, she maintained perhaps the largest medical practice devoted to liver disease in the United States. Dr. Palmer is Clinical Professor of Medicine at New York University Medical Center. Dr. Palmer graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. and was trained in hepatology (as well as medical school) at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Dr. Palmer is Board Certified in Gastroenterology and in Internal Medicine.

She has authored numerous scientific publications in the field of hepatology in such peer-reviewed journals as Hepatology, Gastroenterology, Seminars of Liver Disease, Transplantation and Archives of Internal Medicine.

She is frequently called upon by the media for her opinion on various topics related to liver disease. Dr. Palmer has appeared many times on television as a liver disease expert and has been quoted in such publications as TIME magazine, Cosmopolitan magazine, Prevention magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsday. She also has appeared in numerous videos and CD-Roms aimed at educating doctors and the public about hepatitis C and other liver diseases, such as primary biliary cirrhosis. Dr. Palmer lectures to the medical and general public on liver disease-related topics on a regular basis.

Dr. Palmer has performed numerous clinical trials on various experimental medications for the treatment of hepatitis.

Dr. Palmer is currently available for lecturing, investor and hedge-fund consultations, consultations to industry, and media interviews and appearances-- including television. For such matters, she can be contacted through hepatitismedia@gmail.com.

Return to liverdisease.com home page