Is the HCG Diet a Scam?

What is the HCG Diet?

The HCG Diet, originated by British doctor A.T.W. Simeons in the 1930's, calls for eating only 500 calories a day while taking daily injections of HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone excreted by the placenta during pregnancy. HCG was purported to keep patients from feeling woozy or weak while maintaining a starvation diet.

Already you can see the problem. Extreme low-calorie diets are unhealthy and dangerous, no matter what you are taking to alleviate the symptoms of starvation. But on top of that, it turned out in the end that, in several independent studies which compared a control group taking saline injections on a starvation diet, to a group taking HCG injections on the same diet, both groups lost weight at the same rate, and both had the same physical complaints of constipation, hunger, and weakness.

In the 90's, a team of Dutch researchers examined all the major studies done on HCG and weight loss, and concluded that only 12 of them had been correctly constructed (in such a way as to provide accurate scientific conclusions), and out of those 12, 11 indicated that HCG is useless in weight loss.

So, given all this scientific evidence against the effectiveness of HCG in losing weight, why is the HCG Diet still around? It's thanks to Kevin Trudeau, scam artist and convicted criminal, who wrote "The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You To Know About" in 2007. How many times do doctors, nutritionists, and the FDA have to say it? There is no magic bullet for weight loss. And even if there is, HCG clearly isn't it.