A Warning About Natural Metabolism Boosters

Finding a natural metabolism booster is something that many people are looking for. After all, what could be better for us then an organic supplement that boosts metabolism? Natural is better, right?  What many people don’t know is that many of our prescription drugs are derived from natural plant sources. These plants are synthesized in a lab into the powerful prescription drugs that many of us use today. Because all prescription drugs have side affects it only stands to reason that so called natural metabolism boosters can have unforeseen side affects as well. 

A good case in point for this is the herb ma huang. Ma huang was claimed to increase metabolism and burn away excess body fat. It was extensively used in diet products and was touted to increase energy, alertness, endurance and the intensity with which one could exercise. Sounds like the perfect natural metabolism booster, doesn’t it? Scientific studies showed that it actually did what the claims said. It was combined with caffeine and willow bark in diet products which produced some truly amazing results. People couldn’t get enough of the stuff. 

But then the bad stuff started happening. Ma huang is also known as ephedra, which in recent years was all over the news. The government took it off the market and banned its use after people who were taking it began to suffer heart attacks and strokes, some of them fatal. Part of the problem was people taking too much of it because they figured that if a normal dose works this good imagine what a larger dose could do. For some people it did more than boost their metabolism, it stopped their metabolism. 

What many people did not realize at the time was that ephedra was a natural product. The natural ephedra was confused with its synthetic version known as ephedrine. Ephedrine does the same thing as ephedra but because it is a “synthetically” produced drug it is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is illegal to use ephedrine in diet products. 

The thing to learn from this is that just because a natural metabolism booster is labeled as organic does not mean that it is safe. The human body is a complex chemical system and anything that is ingested will interact on a chemical level. It is hard to know just what certain drugs and herbal remedies will do when mixed together. The most important thing to remember when looking at natural metabolism boosters is not that they are indeed natural, but that they are safe.