Alli - Friend or Foe

I was up late watching television last night, Leno to be precise, when the monologue mentioned a new diet pill hitting the market right now - Alli. The pill is marketed by GlaxoSmithKline ("GSK"). Supposedly, the pill works by limiting how much fat your body retains during digestion. Only a limited amount of fat is taken up during digestion, with the excess fat passed out of the body. If used in conjunction with an effective diet, a person who could expect to lose 10 pounds in two weeks would instead lose 15. Modest impact, but enough to motivate thousands of people to pre-order the pill.

The Alli website touts the pill because it has received FDA approval. This is an important fact - the pill shouldn't be causing any serious side-effects or long-term problems. But a closer look at the website reveals a series of nasty immediate side-effects. GSK has lovingly termed this embarrassing moments "Treatment Effects". None of these side-effects is enough to prevent FDA approval, but perhaps they are enough to dissuade the educated buyer from choosing Alli. The list includes:

• gas with oily spotting
• loose stools
• more frequent stools that may be hard to control

I find this piece of advice equally disturbing:

"You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work"

So the question is, just what are you willing to put up with in order to lose weight?

I, for one, would not be willing to take this pill in order to lose weight. As much as I love donuts, bacon, and anything high in fatty content, I have to believe that I am not alone in preferring a change in diet to making a mess in my pants. What options do I have to avoid embarrassing moments? Wearing adult diapers? I suppose that's a legitimate option, but would I be wearing them all day long and changing every time I have an accident? Perhaps I need a new shirt to warn people of the impending horrors I am about to unleash upon them? If I'm at work, is the only real inconvenience that I must change my clothes? The website fails to mention that if I make a mess in my pants at work, the smell is likely to travel beyond my desk - others will no doubt be consumed unwittingly by the stench of my "gas with oily spotting". And that's assuming a best case scenario of having an accident at my desk. What if it happens during a meeting? What if it happens in the elevator? I am going to take the stairs for the next few weeks, I'm not sure I want to be in any confined spaces with people I don't know for awhile.

I wish this were the only example of drug companies pushing a miracle cure on Americans that had unfortunate side-effects, but alas, there are others. One such example is Olestra, the food additive of the late 1990s. While Olestra was a fat-substitute that supposedly retained flavor, it too was characterized by "Treatment Effects". Olestra warned consumers that it may cause "abdominal cramping and loose stools", but the buzz word of the era was "anal leakage". The FDA categorized complaints under the term "fecal incontinence". I'm not sure it matters how you try and describe these types of side-effects - they will always evoke responses of disgust.

Which leads me to one simple conclusion. The human body is designed to absorb fatty acids. If we don't absorb them, they only have one place to go - out of the body. Unfortunately, the body is not designed with this in mind. Until somebody (God, if you're not too busy, you might want to get on this) re-designs the human body to come up with a less unpleasant means of excreting unwanted fat from our digestive tracts, it appears that the only SAFE AND DIGNIFIED method of losing weight continues to be diet and exercise. Damn! No short-cuts!