How does the new miracle drug Alli work? Depends!

[elfs]

You may have heard about the new over-the-counter drug, Alli, which promises to help you lose weight. It's not a hunger-blocker; you can still (and will still want to) eat all you've always eaten. It's not a metabolism booster; your body still consumes the same calories it always did. Alli works by blocking your gastrointestinal tract's normal fat-absorption mechanism. All those fats and oils you eat, and their calories, never make it into your bloodstream.

Alli has a nasty little side effect. Remember Olestra and all the joking about "anal leakage potato chips"? Alli causes your GI tract to treat your entire diet's worth of fat and oil as if a quarter of it was olestra. The reality check is that the human GI tract isn't actually designed to pass fat and oil. Alli will cause you to crap your pants. This is not supposition. This is what GlaxoSmithCline tells you on their website.

The only way to avoid this side effect: Glaxo tells you to "eat a lowfat diet." Uh, if you were doing that already, would you really need Alli in the first place?

[Hat tip to Broadsheet (it's Salon, YKTD), who does the math, calculates that the average savings per meal is about 36 calories and writes, "If someone were to ask me how many calories it would take to get me to risk shitting myself in public, it'd be a hell of a lot more than 36."]

Comments

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

I suggest you be spanked for that pun in the title. Well I would suggest it if you didn't ENJOY it so much!

New Motto?

[kenshardik]

Alli: It's The Shit!

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

It's awfully like whatever the stuff is that's made from crab shells. Oddly enough, if you have problems with constipation due to medication or whatever, it's actually useful.

Re: New Motto?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Dammit, I just choked on a power bar! (No, that is not a euphemism!)

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

Think of it more as a powerful motivation to switch to a lowfat diet. ;)

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

And on that note, I'm too scared to click on the 'Watch Alli in Action' video. ^O_O^

Re: New Motto?

[kenshardik]

My work here is done. *Flies away*

(And like all comedians, I stole that line from Margaret Cho, whom I paraphrase, "Say what you want about enemas...it's the shit.")

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

The video is lame. I will admit I watched it (or the first half, anyway) with the sound off, but the graphics are exceedingly lame. Very vague.

It was this data point that scared me most: 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

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

You know, more than that, they don't consider it a "side effect", they consider it a *feature* of the drug, and the website makes clear that they feel you should use the discomfort as a motivational tool. So, it's sort of like Antabuse for dieting, or more mildly, like Temposil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temposil). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram) ()

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Actually, this sounds like a fantastic way to force you to eat a low-fat diet. Human beings have this tendency towards not caring about long-term effects of... well, anything, but in this particular case, fat consumption. Sure, every last one of us, despite our growing waistlines, knows full well that we shouldn't eat fatty foods. But we do it anyway because we like them. The ill effects of doing so are something that will happen a million years from now, and the benefits are right now.

But what happens if we feel the effects 12 hours from now? Suddenly, every ounce of fat gets cut from our diets. Just ask anyone who's lactose intolerant. They'd rather avoid anything that has a trace of milk solids in it than suffer the consequences.

IAWTC

[rapier.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine at work has been using Alli since it's ... beta testing, or whatever you call it for medicine. He swears by it, though he did have a little learning curve with the, uh, treatment effects. Honestly, the treatment effects seem like a prime motivator, a way to force one to eat a lowfat diet. Lord knows I lack discipline - perhaps the threat of crapping my pants is just the thing to keep me in line?

[ibsulon.livejournal.com]

So, when do the fetishes start up around this one?

(Free lube!)

[riverheart.livejournal.com]

No thanks, I'd rather keep wasting away with kidney disease. At least I don't get the runs with that.

[fallenpegasus]

When Olestra came out, I tried it. Several bags of chips and such. Any ill effects were no worse than one would expect from eating that much *normal* oil.

And looking at the numbers bore that out. The FDA made them report the side effect because it was showing up slightly more often than in the control groups, who were eating normal oils.

It was on the order of 2% in control, 2.5% in the olestra eaters. Eating a more oil than your body wants to metabolize right now causes "anal leakage", and it's done so since the first time a mammel discovered eating seeds as a food source.

Big fucking deal.


I suspect that Alli's numbers are about the same. Anyone have the numbers? Or have a link?


As RAH said: What are the facts? Again and again and again -- what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion and testimonials, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" -- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?