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).
The offices of Melissa Palmer, M.D. are located at:
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