What kind of rationalists are you? There is one way to lose weight with tons of research backing it, and perfectly valid molecular explanation how it works—one ECA pill every morning until you’re done, if you’re losing weight faster than 1kg/week definitely eat more as that’s not very healthy.
You should behave like proper rationalists now, read some pubmed, order some pills, and lose as much weight as you want. No significant side effects observed, unlike “natural” dieting which causes hunger, loss of willpower, loss of energy etc. Your appetite will be so low you’ll have to use alarm clock to remind yourself to eat, but it won’t hurt when you do, so no willpower expended either way. Ask any random bodybuilder for advice if you need it, they mastered the art of getting rid of fat without harming rest of the body.
I’m 79 kg (bmi 22) down from 106 kg (bmi 30) five years ago, so unlike 95% of after-diet rebouncers I know what I’m talking about.
There is one way to lose weight[...] - one ECA pill every morning until you’re done.
I’m 86 kg (bmi ~27). I took your advice and tried taking one ECA pill every morning for the last few weeks and...I was gaining weight on it. I think I had a little loss of appetite right at first—along with a feeling of being “wired”—but the effect wore off after a day or two.
One confounding factor is that I normally consume a lot of caffeine (~200 mg) daily in the form of Diet Coke. I cut back a bit on the soda while taking ECA, so the change in my caffeine consumption while taking ECA compared to baseline was quite small—perhaps being a prior caffeine addict renders ECA less effective?
As with Shangri-la, one might conclude any of the following:
(a) I just need to take more ECA
(b) I just need to stick with it for longer—eventually the effect will kick in
(c) It works for some people but not others for as-yet unidentified reasons
(d) it doesn’t work, and other factors explain the apparent success in some
Primary effect should be appetite suppression. There are all kinds of things that can go wrong between appetite suppression and fat loss, but if appetite suppression is not present, something must be wrong early. So ignore possibility (b) - you might need to wait for fat loss, but appetite suppression should be almost immediate.
What kind of ECA was it? How much ephedrine/caffeine/aspirin? What I used had 60mg ephedrine and 200mg caffeine (plus probably as much caffeine in drinks). Also some pills are called “ECA” but do not contain any ephedrine and instead something supposedly equivalent.
And as you said, I wouldn’t be surprised if you needed more caffeine if you normally take a lot of it.
Were you actually gaining fat? (as measured by clothing size, or body resistance meters, or other proxy)
By the way, why did you want to lose body weight if your bmi was normal?
I took ECA Extreme which is claimed to contain 25 mg “ephedra extract”, 200mg caffeine, and a few “woo” ingredients. So perhaps I just need a more ephedra-heavy mix.
I was just about stable in terms of fat, neither increasing nor decreasing.
Oops, my mistake—my bodyfat percentage is ~23% (measured by electronic resistance scale); my bmi is actually ~27(corrected in the post) . I don’t really care about BMI—I expect that to be on the high side because BMI is a silly measurement and I’m trying for an “athletic” build. But I do want to reduce fat. I’m hoping to get bodyfat below 20%. My bodyfat level is currently in an “acceptable” health range, but I’ve been working on some circus skills (aerial acrobatics) for which it would be a huge advantage if I could be on the low end of acceptable.
25mg of “ephedra extract” might as well be 5mg of actual ephedrine. Seems like the most likely point of failure. Try with stronger ephedrine—if you don’t see decent appetite suppression I’ll be surprised.
Fat:carb ratio isn’t really relevant, but most modern diets are pretty low in protein and micronutrients, barely enough. If you cut amount of your food by 1⁄3 without changing composition, you might put your protein and micronutrient consumption below healthy threshold, what will result in all sorts of badness. Micronutriens are easy (multivitamin pill). Most bodybuilders keep protein intake pretty much constant on cutting and bulking, so they’re on moderate protein on bulking, and high protein when cutting. Plus proteins don’t store well in our bodies (we have fat storage obviously, plus carb storage in liver and sort-of- in muscles (it’s can only be used for muscle work, never gets released back to blood), but no protein storage), so you pretty much have to eat multiple small protein-containing meals a day if you want to efficiently lose fat without losing muscle.
As I understand it, ECA pills that contain actual ephedrine in amounts as high as you used can no longer be sold either in the US or in the EU—even the link you gave is now invalid because they’ve reformulated your pill. (The new Forza has “30 mg of Ephedra Extract” instead of 60 mg of ephedrine HCL; they recommend you take twice as many pills as before to get a similar effect.)
The good news for Americans is that we can still legally buy 25 mg Ephedrine. It can’t be sold with weight-loss/bodybuilding claims but it’s a legal over-the-counter treatment for asthma, if you don’t buy too much of it at one time. So we can make our own ECA stack using three separate pills. I used this stack: 25mg Ephedrine (Vasopro), 200 mg Caffeine (No-Doz) and 325 mg aspirin.
And...it’s working! You were correct to claim real Ephedrine would have a significant appetite suppressant effect—this was immediately apparent the first day I took it. It’d probably be stronger if I doubled the Eph dose to approach what you were taking—I might do that in a bit. It’s too soon to tell whether I’ll reach my long-term goals but things are definitely moving in the right direction!
UPDATE (2009): it’s still working. So far (about 3 months along), my BMI has dropped from 27 to 25.7; bodyfat has dropped from 23% to 20.5%, and weight has dropped from 86kg to ~81 kg.
I’ve been reading all the medical literature I can find on ECA and editing the wikipedia entry. A few things I’ve realized along the way:
(1) the aspirin component really isn’t necessary; all that matters is the ephedrine and caffeine. (to the extent that it’s been studied, there’s no clear benefit for most users).
(2) It is possible—albeit pretty statistically unlikely—to overdose on ephedrine or ephedra or have bad health effects. When ECA was legal as a supplement there were a great many “adverse effect” reports including perhaps a dozen deaths attributed to it. The FDA banned the sale of ephedra supplements because there was what they regarded as a significant risk associated with it and they didn’t count the fact that it enables easy weight loss as an offsetting benefit.
However, my estimate is that the benefit of this drug far, far outweighs the cost. Every plausible back-of-the-envelope calculation I’ve made says I should keep taking it.
UPDATE (2015): Much like Shangri-La, that initially promising effect of ECA reached a plateau. I didn’t reach my target weight. It seemed like a bad idea to keep taking speed for the indefinite future so I stopped. After I stopped, I regained all the lost weight and then some.
(And as of today my current weight is low once again, but that was accomplished using a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT mechanism which is worth a separate post of its own. No oil or ephedrine were used in the method that ultimately proved successful for me.)
I realize this is a reply to an 8-year old update on a 14-year old post, but on the off chance that this reaches you—what was the diet you described as “ultimately proved successful”? And would you still say that?
I’m diving into the rabbit hole of obesity & diet research and found this whole old thread on the shangri-la diet to be quite interesting. Thanks for sharing your self-experimentation, and updating, even after years.
Do you know any studies showing effect on life expectancy?
ECA seems to work by throwing the body into Continuous Panic Mode. Surely that will burn calories, but just going by analogies to stress, it doesn’t sound good for you even if you dodge the bullet of heart symptoms.
There are no studies on life expectancy effects of almost anything including peanut butter, orange juice, and French fries.
One big argument for ECA safety is that you don’t have to take it continuously. Just figure out how many kilograms you want to lose, it’s most likely going to take 1-2 weeks per kg on ECA (assuming your eat mostly when hungry and just as much as needed to satisfy that, you can obviously drink 5 litres a day of sugared drinks a day even with zero appetite, and still be gaining weight). Unless you’re gaining weight very quickly on your normal diet (in which case you need to adjust that) you won’t have to repeat that in very long time, possibly ever.
The main effect of ECA is down-regulating your appetite—something there are very few known proven methods to do, fen-phen comes to mind, but it was removed from the market (completely misguidedly I’d say). ECA also seems to have some effects on fat and muscle metabolism, and some mild stimulating effects, but it’s not obvious from research that these are of much relevance to humans.
This is serious stuff, so if you have some heart condition or don’t think you can use it responsibly, don’t do it. But then the only other anti-obesity method with better research record is surgery.
Messing with your feelings of hunger is seriously dangerous.
Starvation leads to a massive biochemical response, among other things a excretion of endorphines, so you can get kicks from hunger. (That seems to be one of the ways anorexia works—http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22036318)
So, if you want to test the ECA- theory for yourself, be very, very careful.
(I speak as a person with weak feelings of hunger which tends to forget to eat. I constantly battle against my tendency to lose weight, especially if stressed. That’s no classical eating disorder—I’m very aware that I’m much to thin (BMI around 18). After approx. 2-3 days of low caloric intake (say, only breakfast and nothing else) hunger goes away completely and is replaced by feelings of euphoria and happiness. I suppose, this could happen to anyone who switches of his feelings of hunger. So, be careful, make and keep a timetable for meals!)
People with normal weight and higher (exact numbers depend on gender etc.) have a lot of adipose tissue, which absorbs and releases fuel all the time—after every meal there’s excess energy, between meals and at nights there’s deficit of energy, it actively manages that.
When you eat insufficient amount of food, your body tries to keep your energy in homeostasis by things like:
increased hunger (strongly countered by ECA)
decreased energy levels (strongly countered by ECA)
decreased metabolic rate (somewhat countered by ECA which has minor thermogenic effect)
increased release of fuel from adipose tissue (what we want, maybe somewhat enhanced by ECA)
increased breakdown of lean tissue (maybe somewhat countered by ECA, eating relatively higher protein diet may have protective effect here)
Your homeostasis will get what it wants somehow, and ECA tries to prevent it from doing it the way you don’t want it to, so it’s more or less limited to primarily relying on releasing fuel from adipose tissue. Trying to starve yourself, and willpower the hunger away works much worse than that.
If your adipose tissue cannot do that since it lacks sufficient stored fuel, your body will try the other things harder, and you may have some nasty side effects.
Anyway, who the hell would want to take ECA while being at BMI 18?
Maybe I’ve been a bit unclear. That may be because I’m no native writer of English.
The point I wanted to make was just “Be very, very careful if you start messing with your feelings of hunger.”
Self inflicted eating disorders are no fun.
(Also, there are a lot of people with eating disorders out there. Knowledge about starving more effective can be harmful to some people.)
And just to make it clear no one in their right state of mind would start taking ECA while being at BMI 18, the bit about my BMI was just anecdotal to make my point clearer. The nonanecdotal knowledge is in the link I provided, and a short search at Pubmed or Google Scholar should unearth more facts about hunger and it’s psychic and physical effects.
I’ve never even heard of ECA pills, just had to look them up. So they really work? Side effects?
I’ve always found that the less i eat the less I want to eat. I just have to get into that “zone” of not eating and I then don’t miss food at all. I also feel a mental high when I don’t eat.
As far as side effects go, it’s a low dose stimulant. Some people experience very significant stimulation for the first few days, but it passes quickly while appetite suppression effect persists. If you’re used to caffeine stimulation effect will be lower. You may have sleeping problems if you take them late during the day, they’re supposed to be taken in the morning.
I would not recommend taking ECA long term. 2-3 months at a time should be enough to achieve significant weight loss. Just take them every day, and adequate dose, I’ve seen some people taking them inconsistently and that led to no results whatsoever and all the side effects, and Internet is full of reports of people who took too little ECA and it didn’t do anything. Dose response seems to be binary, too low dosage doesn’t work at all, very high dosage doesn’t provide any more appetite suppression than normal dosage, but you get a lot more side effects.
I’ve never even heard of ECA pills, just had to look them up. So they really work?
Yes, of course they work. They are stimulants. Cocaine, adderall and meth also work as an effective weight loss drugs, in case you were wondering.
Side effects?
Less than the aforementioned cocaine on a side-effect/desired-effect basis. Basically expect the side effects to be “kind of like just having lots of coffee all the time but stronger”.
I just looked up ECA. It is perhaps not as safe as you suggest, but I’d have to actually see the relevant numbers. Seems to be (primarily due to the E, apperently) linked to heart issues. Mostly via making existing issues worse, but possibly in some cases causing issues where there weren’t before. At least according to wikipedia
Best check with your local bodybuilders. In UK you can conveniently order it from the Internet from this website or one of many others. In many countries ephedrine from natural sources doesn’t fall under regulations. Politicians don’t seem that bothered by that, as amounts found in ephedra isn’t economical for large scale amphetamines manufacturing.
What kind of rationalists are you? There is one way to lose weight with tons of research backing it, and perfectly valid molecular explanation how it works—one ECA pill every morning until you’re done, if you’re losing weight faster than 1kg/week definitely eat more as that’s not very healthy.
You should behave like proper rationalists now, read some pubmed, order some pills, and lose as much weight as you want. No significant side effects observed, unlike “natural” dieting which causes hunger, loss of willpower, loss of energy etc. Your appetite will be so low you’ll have to use alarm clock to remind yourself to eat, but it won’t hurt when you do, so no willpower expended either way. Ask any random bodybuilder for advice if you need it, they mastered the art of getting rid of fat without harming rest of the body.
I’m 79 kg (bmi 22) down from 106 kg (bmi 30) five years ago, so unlike 95% of after-diet rebouncers I know what I’m talking about.
I’m 86 kg (bmi ~27). I took your advice and tried taking one ECA pill every morning for the last few weeks and...I was gaining weight on it. I think I had a little loss of appetite right at first—along with a feeling of being “wired”—but the effect wore off after a day or two.
One confounding factor is that I normally consume a lot of caffeine (~200 mg) daily in the form of Diet Coke. I cut back a bit on the soda while taking ECA, so the change in my caffeine consumption while taking ECA compared to baseline was quite small—perhaps being a prior caffeine addict renders ECA less effective?
As with Shangri-la, one might conclude any of the following: (a) I just need to take more ECA (b) I just need to stick with it for longer—eventually the effect will kick in (c) It works for some people but not others for as-yet unidentified reasons (d) it doesn’t work, and other factors explain the apparent success in some
Upvoted for reporting self-experiment result.
Well, at least you tried. My points would be:
Primary effect should be appetite suppression. There are all kinds of things that can go wrong between appetite suppression and fat loss, but if appetite suppression is not present, something must be wrong early. So ignore possibility (b) - you might need to wait for fat loss, but appetite suppression should be almost immediate.
What kind of ECA was it? How much ephedrine/caffeine/aspirin? What I used had 60mg ephedrine and 200mg caffeine (plus probably as much caffeine in drinks). Also some pills are called “ECA” but do not contain any ephedrine and instead something supposedly equivalent.
And as you said, I wouldn’t be surprised if you needed more caffeine if you normally take a lot of it.
Were you actually gaining fat? (as measured by clothing size, or body resistance meters, or other proxy)
By the way, why did you want to lose body weight if your bmi was normal?
I took ECA Extreme which is claimed to contain 25 mg “ephedra extract”, 200mg caffeine, and a few “woo” ingredients. So perhaps I just need a more ephedra-heavy mix.
I was just about stable in terms of fat, neither increasing nor decreasing.
Oops, my mistake—my bodyfat percentage is ~23% (measured by electronic resistance scale); my bmi is actually ~27(corrected in the post) . I don’t really care about BMI—I expect that to be on the high side because BMI is a silly measurement and I’m trying for an “athletic” build. But I do want to reduce fat. I’m hoping to get bodyfat below 20%. My bodyfat level is currently in an “acceptable” health range, but I’ve been working on some circus skills (aerial acrobatics) for which it would be a huge advantage if I could be on the low end of acceptable.
25mg of “ephedra extract” might as well be 5mg of actual ephedrine. Seems like the most likely point of failure. Try with stronger ephedrine—if you don’t see decent appetite suppression I’ll be surprised.
Fat:carb ratio isn’t really relevant, but most modern diets are pretty low in protein and micronutrients, barely enough. If you cut amount of your food by 1⁄3 without changing composition, you might put your protein and micronutrient consumption below healthy threshold, what will result in all sorts of badness. Micronutriens are easy (multivitamin pill). Most bodybuilders keep protein intake pretty much constant on cutting and bulking, so they’re on moderate protein on bulking, and high protein when cutting. Plus proteins don’t store well in our bodies (we have fat storage obviously, plus carb storage in liver and sort-of- in muscles (it’s can only be used for muscle work, never gets released back to blood), but no protein storage), so you pretty much have to eat multiple small protein-containing meals a day if you want to efficiently lose fat without losing muscle.
As I understand it, ECA pills that contain actual ephedrine in amounts as high as you used can no longer be sold either in the US or in the EU—even the link you gave is now invalid because they’ve reformulated your pill. (The new Forza has “30 mg of Ephedra Extract” instead of 60 mg of ephedrine HCL; they recommend you take twice as many pills as before to get a similar effect.)
The good news for Americans is that we can still legally buy 25 mg Ephedrine. It can’t be sold with weight-loss/bodybuilding claims but it’s a legal over-the-counter treatment for asthma, if you don’t buy too much of it at one time. So we can make our own ECA stack using three separate pills. I used this stack: 25mg Ephedrine (Vasopro), 200 mg Caffeine (No-Doz) and 325 mg aspirin.
And...it’s working! You were correct to claim real Ephedrine would have a significant appetite suppressant effect—this was immediately apparent the first day I took it. It’d probably be stronger if I doubled the Eph dose to approach what you were taking—I might do that in a bit. It’s too soon to tell whether I’ll reach my long-term goals but things are definitely moving in the right direction!
UPDATE (2009): it’s still working. So far (about 3 months along), my BMI has dropped from 27 to 25.7; bodyfat has dropped from 23% to 20.5%, and weight has dropped from 86kg to ~81 kg.
I’ve been reading all the medical literature I can find on ECA and editing the wikipedia entry. A few things I’ve realized along the way: (1) the aspirin component really isn’t necessary; all that matters is the ephedrine and caffeine. (to the extent that it’s been studied, there’s no clear benefit for most users). (2) It is possible—albeit pretty statistically unlikely—to overdose on ephedrine or ephedra or have bad health effects. When ECA was legal as a supplement there were a great many “adverse effect” reports including perhaps a dozen deaths attributed to it. The FDA banned the sale of ephedra supplements because there was what they regarded as a significant risk associated with it and they didn’t count the fact that it enables easy weight loss as an offsetting benefit.
However, my estimate is that the benefit of this drug far, far outweighs the cost. Every plausible back-of-the-envelope calculation I’ve made says I should keep taking it.
UPDATE (2015): Much like Shangri-La, that initially promising effect of ECA reached a plateau. I didn’t reach my target weight. It seemed like a bad idea to keep taking speed for the indefinite future so I stopped. After I stopped, I regained all the lost weight and then some.
(And as of today my current weight is low once again, but that was accomplished using a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT mechanism which is worth a separate post of its own. No oil or ephedrine were used in the method that ultimately proved successful for me.)
I realize this is a reply to an 8-year old update on a 14-year old post, but on the off chance that this reaches you—what was the diet you described as “ultimately proved successful”? And would you still say that?
I’m diving into the rabbit hole of obesity & diet research and found this whole old thread on the shangri-la diet to be quite interesting. Thanks for sharing your self-experimentation, and updating, even after years.
Do you know any studies showing effect on life expectancy?
ECA seems to work by throwing the body into Continuous Panic Mode. Surely that will burn calories, but just going by analogies to stress, it doesn’t sound good for you even if you dodge the bullet of heart symptoms.
There are no studies on life expectancy effects of almost anything including peanut butter, orange juice, and French fries.
One big argument for ECA safety is that you don’t have to take it continuously. Just figure out how many kilograms you want to lose, it’s most likely going to take 1-2 weeks per kg on ECA (assuming your eat mostly when hungry and just as much as needed to satisfy that, you can obviously drink 5 litres a day of sugared drinks a day even with zero appetite, and still be gaining weight). Unless you’re gaining weight very quickly on your normal diet (in which case you need to adjust that) you won’t have to repeat that in very long time, possibly ever.
The main effect of ECA is down-regulating your appetite—something there are very few known proven methods to do, fen-phen comes to mind, but it was removed from the market (completely misguidedly I’d say). ECA also seems to have some effects on fat and muscle metabolism, and some mild stimulating effects, but it’s not obvious from research that these are of much relevance to humans.
This is serious stuff, so if you have some heart condition or don’t think you can use it responsibly, don’t do it. But then the only other anti-obesity method with better research record is surgery.
Messing with your feelings of hunger is seriously dangerous. Starvation leads to a massive biochemical response, among other things a excretion of endorphines, so you can get kicks from hunger. (That seems to be one of the ways anorexia works—http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22036318)
So, if you want to test the ECA- theory for yourself, be very, very careful. (I speak as a person with weak feelings of hunger which tends to forget to eat. I constantly battle against my tendency to lose weight, especially if stressed. That’s no classical eating disorder—I’m very aware that I’m much to thin (BMI around 18). After approx. 2-3 days of low caloric intake (say, only breakfast and nothing else) hunger goes away completely and is replaced by feelings of euphoria and happiness. I suppose, this could happen to anyone who switches of his feelings of hunger. So, be careful, make and keep a timetable for meals!)
People with normal weight and higher (exact numbers depend on gender etc.) have a lot of adipose tissue, which absorbs and releases fuel all the time—after every meal there’s excess energy, between meals and at nights there’s deficit of energy, it actively manages that.
When you eat insufficient amount of food, your body tries to keep your energy in homeostasis by things like:
increased hunger (strongly countered by ECA)
decreased energy levels (strongly countered by ECA)
decreased metabolic rate (somewhat countered by ECA which has minor thermogenic effect)
increased release of fuel from adipose tissue (what we want, maybe somewhat enhanced by ECA)
increased breakdown of lean tissue (maybe somewhat countered by ECA, eating relatively higher protein diet may have protective effect here)
Your homeostasis will get what it wants somehow, and ECA tries to prevent it from doing it the way you don’t want it to, so it’s more or less limited to primarily relying on releasing fuel from adipose tissue. Trying to starve yourself, and willpower the hunger away works much worse than that.
If your adipose tissue cannot do that since it lacks sufficient stored fuel, your body will try the other things harder, and you may have some nasty side effects.
Anyway, who the hell would want to take ECA while being at BMI 18?
Maybe I’ve been a bit unclear. That may be because I’m no native writer of English.
The point I wanted to make was just “Be very, very careful if you start messing with your feelings of hunger.” Self inflicted eating disorders are no fun.
(Also, there are a lot of people with eating disorders out there. Knowledge about starving more effective can be harmful to some people.)
And just to make it clear no one in their right state of mind would start taking ECA while being at BMI 18, the bit about my BMI was just anecdotal to make my point clearer. The nonanecdotal knowledge is in the link I provided, and a short search at Pubmed or Google Scholar should unearth more facts about hunger and it’s psychic and physical effects.
I think you were very clear. As might be obvious from this thread, a lot of people have trouble believing in the range of human metabolisms.
Is this deliberate irony?
What is ECA?
Ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin, apparently.
I’ve never even heard of ECA pills, just had to look them up. So they really work? Side effects?
I’ve always found that the less i eat the less I want to eat. I just have to get into that “zone” of not eating and I then don’t miss food at all. I also feel a mental high when I don’t eat.
Has anyone else found this?
As far as side effects go, it’s a low dose stimulant. Some people experience very significant stimulation for the first few days, but it passes quickly while appetite suppression effect persists. If you’re used to caffeine stimulation effect will be lower. You may have sleeping problems if you take them late during the day, they’re supposed to be taken in the morning.
I would not recommend taking ECA long term. 2-3 months at a time should be enough to achieve significant weight loss. Just take them every day, and adequate dose, I’ve seen some people taking them inconsistently and that led to no results whatsoever and all the side effects, and Internet is full of reports of people who took too little ECA and it didn’t do anything. Dose response seems to be binary, too low dosage doesn’t work at all, very high dosage doesn’t provide any more appetite suppression than normal dosage, but you get a lot more side effects.
Yes, of course they work. They are stimulants. Cocaine, adderall and meth also work as an effective weight loss drugs, in case you were wondering.
Less than the aforementioned cocaine on a side-effect/desired-effect basis. Basically expect the side effects to be “kind of like just having lots of coffee all the time but stronger”.
I just looked up ECA. It is perhaps not as safe as you suggest, but I’d have to actually see the relevant numbers. Seems to be (primarily due to the E, apperently) linked to heart issues. Mostly via making existing issues worse, but possibly in some cases causing issues where there weren’t before. At least according to wikipedia
Have they mastered the art of getting ECA in countries where Ephedrine is a controlled substance?
Best check with your local bodybuilders. In UK you can conveniently order it from the Internet from this website or one of many others. In many countries ephedrine from natural sources doesn’t fall under regulations. Politicians don’t seem that bothered by that, as amounts found in ephedra isn’t economical for large scale amphetamines manufacturing.
Read the wikipedia article before following this advice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECA_stack
“In the United States, it is illegal to market products containing ephedrine or ephedra alkaloids as a dietary supplement.”
Sorry, but also are the ECA pills all natural????
Nothing about what we eat and how we behave is even remotely “natural”.
“Natural” humans hunted their food by chasing it in packs with spears or something.
You kids and your new-fangled spears!