Interpol warns of potentially deadly chemical that may be in diet pills
Posted May 7, 2015 8:04 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Have you ever ordered diet pills online and wondered what might be in them?
Interpol is out with a warning, sent to police forces in nearly 200 countries, cautioning you about a potentially deadly chemical.
Police in the UK believe 2.4-Dinitrophenol (DNP) led to the death of a 21-year-old woman there.
It’s believed Eloise Parry took diet pills she’d ordered online, and that DNP was in them.
In its warning, Interpol says the chemical is particularly in demand by those in the bodybuilding world.
Dr. Ayan Panja told the BBC how DNP works:
“What actually happens to the body is that you’re heating up the cells, and the heat is sort of the way that the energy is dissipating and that burns fat. That’s the science behind how it makes you lose weight. But it works so quickly and the effects can be so devastating, and this cooking from the inside is… a horrible, horrible way to die,” says Panja.
Reports out of the UK claim Parry’s mother says her daughter’s metabolism exploded after taking eight of the pills, and she basically burned up inside.
Panja says two pills are enough to kill someone.
Interpol adds the chemical looks similar to turmeric, and distributors label it as the spice to get it by law enforcement.
A lot of clients have questions about diet pills for Vancouver dietician Vashti Verbowski, though she hasn’t been asked specifically about DNP.
Verbowski says most of the time, people she’s treating don’t know what’s in diet pills and ask her about safety.
She points out the weight loss industry is not regulated in Canada, “especially over the Internet; we have to be careful with what we buy because there could be varying amounts of whatever products.”
Verbowski adds marketing tends to take advantage of how impressionable we can be, “especially in the younger population, when they might feel that they see those risks but they might not feel that those risks apply to them.”
Interpol says DNP was withdrawn both in the 1930s and the 1980s after people died, but the chemical has turned up on the black market over the last several years.
