Slimming products should not be sold to young people under the age of 18, experts warn

Lexi Crouch was 14 years old when she started saving her pocket money to buy as many diet pills and products at the supermarket as she could get her hands on – from celery tablets and appetite suppressants to skinny me tea – influenced by the diet culture of the s 90.

At the same age, during the height of lockdowns in Melbourne, Rhea Werner watched her friends buy over-the-counter diet pills, following the advice of influencers. “It was so scary to see them on the screen, it was like they were fading away,” she says.

Crouch and Werner’s experiences mirror the findings of a new global study led by Australian researchers. The study, published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that almost one in ten adolescents has used a medically unapproved weight-loss product.

It finds that the prevalence of 12- to 18-year-olds using diuretics, laxatives and diet pills without a doctor’s prescription was 2% in the past week, 4% in the past month, 6% in the past year and 9% in their to live.

Non-prescription weight-loss products are not medically recommended for children because they do not work, are dangerous to both their physical and psychological health, are associated with unhealthy weight gain in adulthood, and increase the risk of developing an eating disorder, the researchers say.

Natasha Hall, a researcher at Monash University and lead author of the study, says previous studies have also found that use of these products is linked to low self-esteem, depression and poor nutritional intake.

The researchers analyzed data from more than 90 individual studies from 25 different countries, published between 1985 and 2023, on the use of over-the-counter weight loss products in teenagers, involving a total of more than 600,000 individual participants.

The researchers found that prevalence increased, from 5% before 2000 to 10% after 2000.

Bryn Austin, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the paper, says the public health problem is commercially driven, with manufacturers aggressively marketing these products to young people through advertising and social media influencers.

Young people are vulnerable because of the body image pressures they face, Austin says.

Manufacturers also benefit from the poor regulation of these products in most countries, which leads to products being laced with banned and withdrawn drugs, excessive stimulants to the point where they can risk a heart attack, and steroids, Austin says.

“These products have been linked to stroke, heart attack, liver damage, kidney damage and death, and this has happened all over the world. So this global study … is such an important contribution here to be able to see that this is not just happening in Australia, or in the United States or in the United Kingdom. This is happening in many places around the world.”

The newspaper calls for stronger regulations, citing New York state, which last October banned the sale of these products to people under the age of 18.

Dr. Fiona Willer, a dietitian and lecturer at Queensland University of Technology who was not involved in the study, says there is a lot of overlap in the use of weight-loss products with serious eating disorder behaviour, including dieting behavior and extreme obesity. control methods.

“I read this and my heart sinks because a lot of adolescents are using these products,” she says. “It’s a lot of wasted resources for them, a lot of wasted time, effort and dreams.

“If they’re not in a diagnosable eating disorder at the time, they’re not far from that by the time they start using those substances.”

Willer agrees with the paper’s findings that stricter regulations are needed, banning sales to people under the age of 18, and advises any adolescent concerned about their weight to speak to their GP.

The study authors acknowledge limitations, including that most studies (56%) were from North America, and many of the included studies only implied and did not explicitly state that the use of weight-loss products was not prescribed.

Prof. Clare Collins, director of the Food and Nutrition Research Program at the Hunter Medical Research Institute, and professor of nutrition and dietetics at Newcastle University, says: “While the absolute percentages are not high, they are still meaningful figures.”

Because the data in the studies analyzed was self-reported, Collins says the numbers presented in the study are “probably the tip of the iceberg for all young people who are unhappy with their current weight or feel they need help in weight management. ”.