Does the hCG diet work? Is it safe?

Have you heard the ads on the radio?  Or seen all the internet ads for the hCG diet?  Have you tried it, or wondered if it's safe? 

Well DON'T TRY IT.  The SL cannot be emphatic enough on this one folks, the hCG diet is useless and dangerous.  hCG stands for human chorionic gonadotropin.  It is a hormone made by the embryo and the placenta during pregnancy.  It is excreted in urine during pregnancy, and detection of hCG is a common type of pregnancy test.  Diet ads will tell you eating or injecting hCG will aid weight loss - but it's bunk.  See also this article on Web\MD:  http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/truth-about-hcg-for-weight-loss

Any weight lost during the hCG diet is due to extreme calorie deficiency! 

Not only that, it's very dangerous.  The hCG being sold on the internet and other outlets is a biological therapeutic that is completely unregulated by the FDA.  There is no guarantee of the safety, purity, concentration, or even identity of the hCG you can buy.  Injecting an impure, questionably produced hormone into your own body can have serious side effects.  In fact, you could eventually have an immune reaction to hCG, a reaction that could make carrying a pregnancy impossible, as hCG is a critical hormone for successful pregnancy.  The real therapeutic hCG products are actually used to treat infertility, but those have been tested and approved by the FDA, which oversees the quality of the therapeutic product. 

Bottom line:  Do not try the hCG diet!  Most of the nutrition tips and diets I discussed on this blog are harmless, but this one is especially bad.  As always, magical secret cures are usually false.