Ori Hofmekler Blog

The recently FDA approved weight loss pill alli is now available as an OTC drug. Alli targets millions of overweight and obese people who fail to lose weight in spite of dieting. The rates of obesity in America are reaching an epidemic proportion: 30% of all Americans and 40% of all Americans over the age of 50 are clinically obese. Add to this the borderline obese and overweight people and you'll get the overwhelming majority of people living in this country. Yes, 60% of the population, over 200 million people have now a direct access to this new weight loss pill. Let's examine what may happen to this country if the majority of people will start taking alli to lose weight.

Alli is actually a new version of an anti-obesity prescription drug. It works by inhibiting the absorption of fat via inhibition of fat metabolizing enzymes. According to its manufacturer, "the fat passes out of your body..." Nonetheless, together with the loose fat there are also loose stools that apparently pass out of the body...and you may not be able to control these undesirable "passes". Alli manufacturers call this "a treatment effect". Their actual suggestions:

Wear dark pants...and also bring a change of clothes with you to work. They also kindly suggest that if you get gassy – the bathroom is really the best place to go...oh really... Finally, they recommend you to get a food journal in order to recognize what food requires "black pants" and what doesn't. This isn't a joke, if you suddenly realize that the majority of people around you wear dark pants – Run away! Get a gas mask! Get on a boat! Get on a plane! Seriously, if the majority of people will be sitting or standing in the bathroom for most of the day - what would happen to our economy? What would happen to our country? Are we ready to trade our kingdom for a pill? And if we are ready, does it work?

Does alli work?

Alli's premise is to inhibit fat absorption and thus prevent fat gain, but this premise may be based on wrong assumptions. The notion that fat makes you fat is misleading and practically wrong. Yes, there are bad fats that should be avoided, but regardless, fat isn't the main culprit for the current epidemic of obesity. There is growing evidence that other factors of modern men's diet, particularly the high increase in the glycemic index of the diet with a higher intake of refined and processed food are the major contributors to modern men's disease and disorders including obesity, diabetes and cancer. Inhibiting fat absorption may actually accelerate the problem by increasing the overall metabolic stress on the body. Fat is a natural carrier of fat soluble vitamins. It is also the building block for sex hormones and stress hormones, certain fats are essential to the body and the majority of people today are already deficient in essential fatty acids.

Alli is just another commercial gimmicky product that addresses a desperate need for a quick fix solution. There is no shortcut to weight loss. There is no miracle pill that really works. Any attempt to shortcut a natural metabolic process in the body may short-circuit your health.

The typical modern diet is a complete disaster. The current epidemic of cancer, obesity and diabetes are proof-positive that poor eating habits and inferior nutritional products are accelerating a myriad of horrific epidemics. Doctors, nutritionists and so-called "heath experts" look for the next compound, substance or medicinal miracle substance to sell to the public for profit. Profit is King. Meanwhile real miracle substances and compounds are available, not at GNC or pharmacy, but rather at the local grocery store! For example; certain primal foods at the low end of the food chain, plant foods such as broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, beans, nuts, seeds, etc., are incredibly beneficial, yet often neglected and underappreciated! In addition there is the issue of pollution: we live today in a world contaminated with industrial toxic chemicals. We also overlook the fact that we have inherited mechanisms that can protect us from most of these harmful compounds. But these inherited mechanisms cannot be activated without proper nutrition.

Modern day nutrition places incredible emphasis on vitamins and minerals, and while it is true that these are essential and needed, but by themselves they are useless! Vitamins and minerals are attributed with way more power than they actually deliver. What really works best are primitive foods from the bottom of the food chain, foods that provide us with primal nutrients, flavonoids, flavonones, glycosides, indoles and sterols. These nutrients have been shown to nourish the body’s command center, the brain and the hormonal system. Many of these primal nutrients work in a way that recharge and revitalize the entire body and keep it in a young and viral state. My approach to human nutrition is fundamentally anti-industrial.

To understand what is wrong with modern fitness, we need to look hard and long at primordial times and examine what we, as a species, evolved from. Science has established that the human species peaked, in terms of its genetic development, roughly 10,000 years ago in the late Paleolithic period. By that time we had inherited all the survival mechanisms needed to keep the human species alive on the planet. Unfortunately the world that we adapted to back then, that primordial, environmentally pristine planet, does not exist anymore. There is substantial evidence that our survival in the future is dependent upon reviving certain aspects of our ancient past. The key to ensuring our future as a species lies in understanding our distant past: we have lost certain elements, certain capacities and capabilities that we once possessed and possess no longer. We are unaware of this profound lose and I suggest that by recognizing these lost elements and reclaiming them, we can correct ourselves, right our course and continue onward.

Meanwhile the dominant fitness industry brainwashes us: "look to the promising future." If suddenly we came to the collective realization that our future lies in the past, would this not be a form of economic suicide for firms selling "new and improved" products? Nowadays there is a lack of humility and a lack of any sense of history. We feel we are sophisticated and forward thinking and nothing of value can be gained from studying the recent past, much less our distant, primordial past. Consequently we are gradually losing our capacity to survive without resorting to a dependence on medicinal drugs.

It is now known that the sympathetic nervous system virtually rejects eating! Here is the heart of the problem: most of us eat under stress during the day – and we're not supposed to! We are supposed to eat very little! That's the way the human body was designed. When you take a flesh machine designed to run on very little food and overwhelm it with food, bad food to boot, bad things are going to happen. Recent scientific literature on intermittent fasting proves my point. I published this theory seven years ago and since then, many in the scientific community embraced the concepts I set forth. However, scientists work according to predictions, and life is about surprise. The best and smartest scientists working in this field have already been predicting that we humans are not designed to eat much food during the daily working hours. We have inherited mechanisms that compensate us when we don't eat.

When we do as we were originally intended, when we take advantage of our primordial hardwiring and limit food intake during the day, we realize a host of amazing benefits: increased energy, increased and improved food/fuel utilization, increased alertness, increased toxin removal capacity, improved stress-handling ability...The list of benefits goes on and on.

On the other hand, when we overeat the wrong stuff during the day the list of disabilities, drawbacks, downsides and health consequences is equally as devastating: diabetes, heart attack, obesity, arterial clogging, constipation . . . on and on it goes.

Humans are inherently night eaters. Our autonomic nervous system is well programmed for night feeding. At night the body is under the dominance of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is triggered by eating large meals. This nightly nervous system is responsible for the regulation of critical nightly functions including relaxation, digestion and sleep.

Any interruption in the parasympathetic nervous system may cause severe side effects including: insomnia, indigestion, chronic fatigue, agitation, inability to cope with stress, physical weakness, craving for sweets and eating disorders.

The premise of the one main meal per day - at night - goes against all industrial interests. It means less money spent on breakfast, less on lunch, less on commercial products and less on doctor bills. An army of nutrition experts would tell you that this goes against any conventional dietary approach and doctors recommendations. Regardless, this is how humans are supposed to eat and if they don't, they will suffer the consequences like most people today do.

In Parts 1 & 2 of this series on detoxifying your body, we savaged MSNBC for shallow reporting. In this, the last installment, we tell you why you should eat fat.

Humans adapted early on to primal fat-rich foods, such as nuts and seeds, consistent with hunter-gatherer societal development. Thus, it is very likely that we do better on these primal high-fat foods than our current low-fat staples such as bread and pasta.

The idea of wholesale cutting back on fat is fundamentally wrong.

Nothing is this black and white. There are good fats and bad fats. Good fats include HDL boosting fats found in nuts, olives, avocados soybeans and fish such as salmon or mackerel, both of which are high in Omega-3 fatty acids which have been proven to help prevent heart attacks.

In actuality, most people today are deficient in good fats.

Fats Are Good For You

Fats are necessary for our bodies to process fat soluble vitamins such as A, D, E and K, it constitutes all cellular membranes, and most of the brain tissues. It is the building block for sex hormones. It helps maintain healthy skin and hair and protect vital organs. Cutting back on these fats can be highly detrimental to your health.

Who Can You Trust?

It's always a good idea to beware of media outlets that value easy answers over harder truths. The truth: our food supply is not entirely healthy. Don’t expect major media players like MSNBC to talk about how some of their advertisers push garbage.

It's time to redefine nutrition and health. Time to realize that with all the toxins and chemicals that we put into our bodies, bodies that were not designed to process these massive amounts of unnatural substances, it only makes sense to give our bodies a break and rid our systems of as much of the build up of pollutants as possible. Time to realize that detoxification is a natural and historically sound process. Time to see detox as a tool that can help us rebalance our system and increase our ability to thrive and survive.