Almost one in 10 girls has taken diet pills

ALMOST one in 10 girls has taken “very dangerous” diet pills and weightloss aids in the past year, a study has found.

More than 5 per cent of boys and girls under 18 had taken pills, laxatives or diuretics without a prescription and with the intention to lose weight. This increased to almost 10 per cent among just girls. Experts said they were “alarmed that so many children and young people have been able to access diet pills and laxatives”.

A global study of 604,552 children was carried out by researchers from Deakin and Monash universities in Australia. They found girls were more likely than boys to use the over-the-counter drugs over all the time frames analysed. They said it was a “public health concern” and that their use among girls correlated to “low self-esteem, parental influence to lose weight or parental dissatisfaction with weight, self-body dissatisfaction, peer groups who value thinness, and media or social media influences promoting unrealistic beauty standards”.

Even when excluding the children at greatest risk, because they had a substance abuse or eating disorder, 8.9 per cent had used diet pills or aids in their lifetime, and 2 per cent in the past week.

Researchers warned that these drugs “do not work, are dangerous, associated with unhealthful weight gain in adulthood, and increase the risk of being diagnosed with an eating disorder within several years of onset of use”.

Products and supplements are being sold online around the world without regulation or the need for a prescription. UK health authorities seized at least 369 fake weight-loss drugs claiming to be Ozempic in 2023.

The drug includes the active ingredient semaglutide, also present in weightloss jab Wegovy.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has warned the public “not to buy pre-filled pens claiming to contain Ozempic (semaglutide) or Saxenda (liraglutide)”.

In 2023, an active ingredient in some diet pills, called DNP, or 2,4-dinitrophenol, was reclassified as “poison” by the Government.

The research was published in the JAMA Network Open medical journal and involved an analysis of 90 studies.