The so-called miracle pills, increasingly present and accessible to all, continue to create adepts and generate harmful consequences for health from the complicity of a society that bases its beauty and health on immediate results.
“For nutrition there are no miracles,” says nutritionist Amelia Aldana Efe, ending the hopes of many consumers of these products that lack sanitary registration and offer therapeutic properties.
“It is believed that because advertising makes you feel that way,” he explains, relating the fact to people’s desperation to achieve certain health or aesthetic conditions.
In Mexico, seven out of 10 adults are obese, something for the doctor “is causing people desperately seek to lose weight.”
He believes that people, from an awareness, “is understanding that obesity is a disease” and therefore “is looking to lose weight for health.”
A patient of his, who spoke with Efe on condition of anonymity, and who experimented with the pills some time ago, does not seem to think the same thing. “It’s an aesthetic question,” he says.
“If it were a question of health, you would go to the doctor and change your habits”, explains the patient, who had complex because of its corpulence since childhood.
Before taking the pills, he underwent 15 treatments involving doctors and specialized nutritionists, without favorable results.
Not seeing immediate losses inclined her to opt for miracle pills, advised by a relative.
Pills are often products from China salable in pharmacies without the need for prescriptions or via telephone sales. “People do not even know what it takes,” says Aldana.
“It was a blue pill and a red pill. The boxes had a picture that showed a person losing weight along with Chinese letters,” that’s all the information that the drug brought to the patient.
“There was the rumor that a friend of my aunt had sent them to investigate and they were good pills,” he said, and this is all he needed to trust them.
The case of Lucero Priscila Garza, a 24-year-old girl who died earlier this month due to complications following the consumption of the product Avitia Cobrax, with which she sought to lose weight, triggered the alarms.
“You know what makes people do what it is? The desire to lose weight,” says the nutritionist, who begs people not to be fooled by these opportunistic products, because “the results and consequences are lethal.”
The body is extremely dehydrated as soon as we begin to ingest these so-called miracle drugs, due to the diuretics present in its composition, he points out.
Other effects, such as “cardiac arrhythmia, anxiety and insomnia,” are added.
His patient corroborates how he could not sleep at night, languishing insomniacally on the sheets until “at least three in the morning” and with “an insatiable thirst.” Even so, she was happy, lost seven pounds in four months.
For the doctor, this is a confusion: “They lose weight, but because they lose water”.
Indeed, his patient, when he stopped taking the pills because of recurrent insomnia and anxiety, regained his lost weight and even increased some kilos.
But the doctor worries more about the long-term effects: “Liver damage and kidney damage,” he says.
Aldana understands, while regrets, the immediate needs in terms of weight loss and fears that the doctor will restrict faster and cheaper options.
“They use such miracle treatments because it is easier to access and they do not have to go to an appointment,” he explains, and his patient confirms it by adding that “going to the doctor takes some effort” like time and money.
“To come to the nutritionist has become the last option and should be the first,” explains Aldana.
His patient, while taking the pills, avoided consulting a nutritionist or doctor because he already knew that he would repress the use of pills. “Women are asked to have an ideal size,” he argues.
Now, after having stopped taking them, the patient prioritizes her health. “Today at my 38 years I do things for health,” he says, convinced not to take the pills again.
The young woman represents one more case of consumption of miracle pills that, after passing a bad experience, now understands that its health is above its beauty.
