Monday 4 January 2010

Try Before You Die


In servicing the guilty weight loss market, the classic approach of juxtaposing a black and white photograph of a glum, fat person alongside a bright, colour snap of the happy, slimmed down version is being replaced by a new tactic, it would appear.

Almost nine in 10 people are not aware of the risks of carrying extra fat around their waistline.

The report from GlaxoSmithKline, who make weight loss drug Alli, said this "visceral fat" is strongly linked with type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

It is thought that the danger of visceral fat is related to the release of proteins and hormones that can cause inflammation, which in turn can damage arteries and enter the liver, and affect how the body breaks down sugars and fats.

Move over gentle persuasion, there's a new, dynamic, forceful guy in big pharma advertising town.

And he has a simple message, "Buy our products ... or die".




7 comments:

Leg-iron said...

Hey, wait a minute. Heart disease belongs to nicotine these days, which stole it from alcohol. Except it only causes heart disease in non-smokers when they get a slight whiff of smoke. Smokers are immune.

And I'm sure diabetes used to belong to excessive raw sugar consumption, no matter the waist size.

Can't these diet fadders find their own diseases to play with? How about leprosy and scrofula? None of the Righteous-controlled things have been associated with those two yet.

Or maybe bipolar disorder? Oh, wait, that's caused by comitting a crime and getting caught.

There's always ringworm, I suppose.

timbone said...

I was collecting a repeat prescription for my smoking, drinking, adorable farting wife the other day, and read the details about Alli. I had stood on new scales that morning and nearly died of obesity. When I saw the bit on the Alli info that said it may alter your bowel movements, I immediately lost interest. My fat loving, foul mouthed wife came home from work that evening to inform me that one of her colleagues had been rushed into hospital for an urgent, life saving operation on her bowels. Yep, you have got it in one, she had been using Alli.

Anonymous said...

So...is Alli's method weight-loss through diarrohea? Then you can buy pills to 're-balance your bowel movements'! They always win...

Jay

Andy said...

"Buy our products ... or die"
Its a tried and tested formula(unlike their anti-smoking drugs)isnt it.

The fatties are even more cost effective it seems. They get put straight on the patented drugs. The foul smokers have to be put on less profitable NRT before they can be coerced onto the real money spinners.

But, Once that there are nice food and alcohol bans we can all just be put on patented anti-depressants to get through our fun-free lives.The holy grail of pharma.

Pogo said...

IIRC from one of the lamented "Dr Crippen's" postings... Isn't one of Alli's side effects rather euphemistically described as "anal leakage", ie it causes you to shit yourself?

I think that "Crippen" described it as the "shitty knickers drug". :-(

David Gillies said...

The 'leakage' problem was what killed Olestra. Xenical has the same problem. You don't lose weight because you're not metabolising fat, you lose weight because you're so terrified of eating anything fatty and crapping yourself that you cut it out of your diet. As for Type II diabetes: I've got it and it's bloody miserable but I make sure to eat at least one enormous bacon cheeseburger a week just to maintain my weight above 63kg, which is the point where I start to enter the much more dangerous territory of being underweight. The rest of the time it's salads and fruit and fish (wine-poached salmon tonight, yum!) but the idea that the occasional burger will put you in an early grave is just the neo-Puritans trying to wring that extra little drop of misery out of peoples' lives. In a sane world they'd all be put in a big field and napalmed repeatedly, but we don't live in a sane world.

Henry North London 2.0 said...

Alli is a waste of time... Why else would it have made Over the Counter where Viagra and other more potent medicines haven't?

Viagra works, Alli doesn't