Using safe stimulants in your diet pills can help to give you a considerable advantage over your weight loss strategy. After all, when you’re dieting, you don’t want fatigue, dwindling motivation and a lack of focus to hold you back. You want to be energized, driven and ready to power through your workout and your day.
However, a recent study has shown that not all companies are choosing safe stimulants in their pills. This research was published in Clinical Toxicology. It found that many products are continuing to use higenamine in their diet pills and fitness supplements.
Should Higenamine Be Considered Among Safe Stimulants?
Higenamine is considered to be legal to use in supplements in the United States, Canada and Europe. However, because of issues relating to its use among safe stimulants, it is a banned substance by World’s Anti-Doping Agency.
Does this mean you’re safe as long as you’re not competing athletically? Not necessarily. The problem wasn’t just that the pills in these studies were found to contain substances that are not safe stimulants. The researchers also determined that many weight loss and sports pills that contained higenamine did so in unpredictable and widely varying amounts.
It’s the Amount that Matters
The research showed that the amount of higenamine in the product did not necessarily align with what was listed on the label. Moreover, from one pill to the next and one bottle to the next, the dosage of this ingredient varied widely, and not in a predictable way. Therefore, even if you could include this ingredient among safe stimulants, you still couldn’t claim that it was being used safely within these products. After all, there was no way to know how much each pill would contain.
What Was the Safe Stimulants Research About?
The study was conducted by Harvard’s Pieter Cohen, MD, dietary supplement industry critic, as well as NSF International’s John Travis, PhD, and a complete team. Among the researchers were several associated with Dutch National Institute for Health and the Environment.
The researchers conducted a safe stimulants analysis on 24 supplements with higenamine listed on their label (or one of the ingredient’s synonyms, such as demethylcoclaurine or nococlaurine). This substance was considered to be risky on its own, but was deemed even worse considering how unpredictably it was being used. The report on the research cautioned physicians to be aware of potential unexpected cardiac results from use of products with this ingredient.
