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Although after the success of the nicotine patch, intuitively, a diet patch might seem like a good idea, the truth of the matter is that food (though it sometimes acts like it) is not a drug. A magic patch is unable (according to doctors) to make people stop overeating. Now, the cause of all the fierce debate is that some foods do seem to act more like a drug than other foods. While there is no way to make a patch make someone stop eating altogether, some researchers are convinced that specific foods can have lesser cravings if the body has an alternative source of the chemical that makes the person crave it.
Chocolate is a good example of this because people very often crave chocolate, and the fact that women crave it more often than men and that women’s cravings are somewhat dependant on hormonal levels, leads one to think that there must be a possibility for substituting that chemical demand with something more medical than with chocolate itself. One of the many problems with this is that people also get satisfaction from the act of eating chocolate itself. The enjoyment is not only in the chemicals, but also in the flavor and the satisfaction that comes from break it up and letting it melt in your mouth. However, on a strictly chemical level, it is possible to alter the hormonal levels in the body in a way to stop cravings for chocolate.
On the other hand, a diet patch that claims to stop overeating of pizza—how would that work exactly? Pizza is not hormonal or chemical, what is it about pizza that can make a craving for it so strong? A lot of people would argue that they’re simply conditioned cravings, that having pizza throughout one’s life creates a sort of connection to it that causes cravings. On the other hand, some nutritionists and experimenters have found that McDonald’s French fries have a certain habit-forming quality. Is there something chemical with this? Everyone knows that they were spraying their fries with beef fat, but is this merely a good taste or does it act on humans in a more chemically dependent way?
Likewise, how could a diet patch claim to stop cravings for Krispy Kreme donuts or for Ben and Jerry’s ice cream? The possibility of a patch stopping the cravings suggests that either all Krispy Kreme donuts or all flavors of Ben and Jerry’s have a certain chemical in them; there has to be a chemical that is common before an addiction can occur. The only other possibility for this working would be that the effect of the patch is purely psychosomatic. If people believe that the patch is going to stop them from overeating in their favourite food categories, this mental power might just be the only thing that is really needed.
In any case, the only thing that is already crystal clear is that doctors agree that a patch cannot cure you of overeating in a global sense. While it may be possible to curb cravings for specific things, such as chocolate, in some people, the promise of a diet patch that helps you stop overeating in a global sense is, according to researchers, nonsense. In addition to this kind of diet patch, there are patches that claim to help you lose weight by giving the body substances such as hoodia transdermally; these too should be avoided. The bottom line is that when it comes to diet ‘magic fixes’, just like economical ‘magic fixes’, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is—don’t waste your time and money.