Diet pills are a huge seller in the United States and around the world, but are they really effective? Do they work?

Overall the results don't seem to be good in the long term...

Research done by the Australian Consumer Association's Choice Online tested the top 10 ingredients in 18 different herbal weight loss products. What they found is that there did not seem to be any benefit for users of these ingrediets above what diet and exercise already provided. Although they found that some of the participants lost weight, its a very small amount.

So it seems there is little evidence to suggest that diet pills are effective long term. And it doesn't seem to matter whether you have diet pills with or without a prescription. It seems to be the same story. For permanent weight loss, it comes back to the same formula - there has to be more calories spent by your body than taken in from eating on a regular basis. Diet pills should be seen as a tool to help you achieve that, rather than it being the main focus of your whole weight loss efforts. People who rely entirely on diet pills rarely keep any of the weight loss they may get from the drug.

You also want to be careful of the potential side effects of some of these pills. Many types and brands of weight loss pills sold over the internet are thought to contain traces of ampetamines. Amphetamines are a dangerous drug known to cause all sorts of side effects - from headaches to jitters and skin blotches. It can be quite nasty.

So should you never use a diet pill?

No, not necessarily. Its ok to use safe diet pills in the short term to get you into good habits to help you achieve your long term goals. If you've got a habit of overeating then it's hard to just change that around suddenly. But with the selection of the right diet pill, you can start to enjoy some of the results while you ease into your program.

You need to remember that the pill you'll use should only be taken with a balanced diet and an exercise program for permanent weight loss. If you're not prepared to do this, then no pill will work for you past a few weeks (at most).

So how do you find a safe diet pill?

In all of our research, we could only find one current weight loss pill that we can recommend because it has no known side effects so far. To get the full story of which diet pill we recommend, and how hard it is to actually get access to it, please read this article on "The best weight loss pill available".