(CBS) – Losing weight can be frustrating. Plenty of people are looking for the magic bullet to help them achieve their goal.
You may have seen the ads on the web lately for what claims to be the newest, fastest fat-burner. But what is it and does it work?
CBS 2’s Mary Kay Kleist checks out garcinia cambogia.
TV’s “Dr. Oz” talked about it on his show. With research from Georgetown University, people rushed to buy pills that supposedly will help you lose weight without diet or exercise.
“Everybody’s looking for the magic pill,” says Mike Carlucci, who tried the product.
The pumpkin-shaped fruit that grows in Southeast Asia and India supposedly suppresses appetite and blocks fat from being made in the body. Dr. Harry Preuss from Georgetown University studied the extract and says it has “great metabolic effects” that prevents conversion of carbohydrates into fat.
Dana Vento lost 8 inches off her waistline by taking garcinia and exercising a little more.
“It was very rewarding to see the difference, and I think in moms that’s a big deal when you can lose some of that belly fat,” she says.
Others had no luck with it.
“As far as I’m concerned, the research isn’t very accurate, in my case, because it didn’t work at all,” Carlucci says.
Melinda Ring, medical director for Northwestern Integrative Medicine, says it may not work for everyone, depending on factors.
“Just because one particular extract of the HCA worked doesn’t mean that every other garcinia brand is going to have the same effect,” she says.
Because supplements are not all created equal, here’s what to look for: the words garcinia cambogia; at least 50 percent HCA (hydroxycitric acid); potassium (for absorption); and zero fillers, binders or artificial ingredients.
Garcinia is definitely not for everyone. People with certain medical conditions should avoid taking it. That includes women who are pregnant or breastfeeding. Also, garcinia is not recommended for people with diabetes, Alzheimer’s or those taking statin medication for high cholesterol.
So, could this tiny pill be a miracle weight loss supplement? Maybe.
“I think it can be a beneficial adjunct to a well-rounded approach to weight loss,” Ring says.
Patients were only studied for 12 weeks on the supplement; so, until larger, longer studies are conducted, it’s recommended to limit use to three months and make sure you eat healthy and exercise daily.
A blog I am writing for was looking for a new place to host their website. Since we have a nice cluster with Rancher up and running, I offered to host the site. It's WordPress, so PHP, so how hard could it be, right?
I spent quite a few hours migrating everything. The initial migration to Docker was not that hard. There is a great official WordPress image for Docker, which makes it extremely easy to set up a new WordPress site in Docker.
The next thing is handling file uploads. Using the do-spaces-sync plugin this was easily set up to use DigitalOcean Spaces. It took a while to upload all images from the old wp-content/uploads to Spaces, but once that was done, I had it working immediately after setting it up. So far, this whole migration was a breeze.
Until I flipped the switch on the DNS and pointed it to our new hosting. I immediately got caught in an infinite redirect loop, and I had no idea why. I've spent hours turning off plugins, turning them on again. Debugging everything, watching logs. I could not figure it out. In the headers I did find a header saying that the redirect came from WordPress:
X-Redirect-By: WordPress
Eventually, I tried explaining the problem in the #wordpress channel in the PHPNL slack and as I'm typing my explanation something dawns on me...
Our Rancher setup has a load balancer that terminates the HTTPS then forwards an internal request to the container using http. But in WordPress, I have configured the siteurl to be https://. So WordPress gets a request using http, figures out it should be using https, and redirects. This causes the infinite redirect loop!
Of course, I wasn't the first to encounter this problem. Once I know what the problem was, searching the Internet quickly gave me the solution. In Wordpress Codex of course. The only thing I needed to do was add a single line to my .htaccess file:
SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-Proto https HTTPS
Once I did that, rebuilt my containers and deployed them to Rancher, the problem was solved. All of a sudden, everything worked.
FRIDAY, Oct. 12, 2018 (HealthDay News) — U.S. health officials have issued more than 700 warnings during the last decade about the sale of dietary supplements that contain unapproved and potentially dangerous drug ingredients, new research reveals.
In nearly all cases (98 percent), the presence of such ingredients was not noted anywhere on supplement labeling, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found.
From 2007 to 2016, the lion’s share of FDA warnings — 46 percent — concerned supplements that touted enhanced sexual pleasure, while weight-loss products were cited in 41 percent of the warnings. Most of the remaining warnings (12 percent) concerned supplements marketed as muscle-builders, the findings showed.
The tainted-supplement problem appears to have grown in scope in recent years, with 57 percent of all warnings having been issued since 2012, the researchers said.
“Over the past decade, ever since I first began tracking the problem, I have only seen the number of supplements adulterated with drugs increase rapidly,” said Dr. Pieter Cohen. He is a general internist with the Cambridge Health Alliance, and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
“Back in 2009, it appeared that there might be less than 150 brands of supplements that contain drugs,” he added. “Now it’s clear that there are well over 1,000 brands of supplements that contain active drugs.”
Cohen is the author an editorial that accompanies the new analysis, which was published online Oct. 12 in JAMA Network Open. The study was led by Madhur Kumar, of the California Department of Public Health’s Food and Drug Branch.
Kumar’s team noted that more than half of all American adults routinely take some form of dietary supplement, with estimated annual sales of $35 billion.
The FDA explicitly warns that supplements aren’t a replacement for either over-the-counter or prescription medications, and should not be viewed as a way to treat or prevent disease.
The agency classifies dietary supplements — including vitamins, minerals, botanicals, amino acids and enzymes — under the category of food, rather than drugs.
That distinction is important.
Continued
“Supplements are handled completely different than either prescription medications or over-the-counter drugs,” Cohen explained. “Those two categories are carefully vetted by the FDA. Supplements are not vetted by the FDA, and do not require that any evidence of safety or efficacy is presented to the agency before they are sold to consumers.”
The FDA’s Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 essentially places the burden for evaluating supplement safety, content and labeling primarily on the shoulders of the manufacturers, he said.
Experts point out that this arrangement means that, while the FDA has the authority to remove from the market any supplement reported as causing harm, as a practical matter it does so only after the fact. This raises the risk for a wide range of “serious adverse events” involving tainted supplements — including stroke, kidney failure, liver injuries, blood clots and even death — critics of the arrangement contend.
The study team said prior estimates suggest that such events result in roughly 23,000 emergency department visits and 2,000 hospitalizations in the United States every year.
The new analysis reviewed a decade’s worth of information contained in an FDA database titled “Tainted Products Marketed as Dietary Supplements.”
Almost 800 tainted warnings were issued during the review period for supplements manufactured by 147 different companies, though some involved multiple warnings about the same supplement, the study authors said.
About 20 percent of the warnings identified products containing more than one unapproved ingredient, the investigators found. Sildenafil (commonly known as Viagra) was the ingredient in nearly half of the warnings concerning sexual enhancement supplements.
Sibutramine — an appetite suppressant taken off the market in 2010 due to cardiovascular risks — was cited in nearly 85 percent of weight-loss supplements, according to the report.
And among muscle-building supplements, synthetic steroids or steroid-like ingredients were the cause for concern nearly 90 percent of the time, the researchers said.
Cohen said any meaningful solution will require a change in the laws that govern the way the FDA monitors supplements. Barring that, you should “ask your doctor if you need to take supplements,” he advised.
“If your doctor doesn’t advise supplements for your health, then they will likely not help you,” Cohen stressed. “However, for my patients who still want to use supplements, I advise them to purchase supplements that list only one ingredient on the label and to avoid any supplement that has a health claim on the label, such as improving immunity or strengthening muscles.”
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Garcinia cambogia fruit, photograph courtesy of Vssun via Wikimedia Commons.
The holiday season is rich with traditions, and many of these involving eating. Most of us indulge in more snacks, finger foods, desserts, alcohol and large holiday meals from Thanksgiving through the New Year. The resulting weight gain frequently leads to another tradition: a New Year’s resolution to diet.
There are many popular diets such as the Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and Slim-Fast diets. But the latest buzz is about a weight-loss supplement called Garcinia cambogia. On the Dr. Oz television show, Garcinia cambogia was called the ”newest, fastest fat-buster” and a “magic ingredient that lets you lose weight without diet or exercise.” It sounds like the perfect solution for all that holiday over-eating, especially since celebrities like Britney Spears and Kim Kardashian lost significant body fat using it.
Are Garcinia cambogia supplements really the weight-loss “holy grail” that Dr. Oz claims? What is it? Is it safe and effective?
Garcinia cambogia is a small, pumpkin-shaped fruit that comes from parts of Asia, India, Africa and the Polynesian islands. Also known as Malabar tamarind, the fruit pulp and rind have been used for centuries for culinary and therapeutic purposes. For instance, it’s frequently used in chutneys and curries.
Since Garcinia cambogia has been ingested for centuries without reports of adverse side effects, it appears to be safe for most people when taken at normal doses. This is supported by scientific studies that showed no difference in side effects between people treated with Garcinia cambogia and those treated with a placebo. The most common side effects included headaches, upper respiratory tract symptoms, and gastrointestinal symptoms. However, it’s not recommended for some people such as diabetics and women who are pregnant.
PHP Internals News: Episode 1: Saner string to number comparisons
London, UK
Friday, March 8th 2019, 13:21 GMT
Welcome to the first episode of "PHP Internals News", a weekly-ish podcast about what goes on in the land of PHP development. In this podcast, we discuss current RFCs that are up for discussion, implementations of features with technical detail, and explanations of odd bugs, and their fixes.
