The real story on diet pills, however, isn't so simple. For starters, there's the ephedra ban which has been illegally initiated by a rogue government agency that primarily serves to protect the pharmaceutical industry while discrediting all nutritional supplements. There are 150 deaths apparently linked to ephedra. Over-the-counter pain medications kill 40,000 American each year by comparison. Prescription drugs kill another 100,000. Where is the FDA outcry on these drugs?
Second, there's the abuse issue. You can't possible be killed by ephedra unless you abuse it by taking too many pills at once in some sort of desparate weight loss attempt. Over-the-counter pain pills and prescription drugs, by comparison, kill people even when taken at the proper dosage So there's a tremendous difference in the risk of death with ephedra vs. prescription drugs, and yet the FDA chose to focus on ephedra.
The real story goes beyond just the FDA, by the way: people taking diet pills are seeking to accelerate their weight loss efforts, of course. While using nutritional supplements to aid in weight loss is fine, far too many consumers rely exclusively on diet pills rather than addressing the fundamentals: nutrition and physical exercise. If you don't stop drinking soft drinks and eating metabolic disruptors, you'll never lose weight. If you don't exercise an hour a day, you'll never be thin. If you don't supplement your diet with nutritionally-dense superfoods like chlorella, quinoa and flax oil, you'll never be able to lose the weight you really want.
You can't get thin from taking a pill. Yes, a pill can help, but the real effort has to come from you.