Talking about weight loss supplements, we all have our favorites. And we usually favor those that help us lose weight with the speed of light. Of course we know we should be more interested in acquiring a healthy weight loss, rather than simply being thin, but society and peer pressure and the lack of quality information make everything so difficult to manage when it comes to losing weight in a smart way. There are some healthy weight loss supplements, some are less healthy and others are outright dangerous.

Let's start with what I consider to be dangerous supplements: anything containing more than one active substance, for synthetic products, or containing more than one plant extract and has not been FDA tested and approved. Testing how a certain chemical affects our bodies is pretty much a straight-forward process. People are given a certain amount of the said chemical substance and their reactions are recorded over a period of time.

Then scientists start to see how this substance may or may not react to well known drugs and medical conditions ? is it safe to take it while also taking, let's say drugs that lower blood pressure? Is it safe when you suffer from gastritis? We are talking about one substance alone. Taking more than one drug at the time requires you to go to a health care professional and have him or her analyze the potential benefits or risks. All doctors are careful when they prescribe more than one drug because they are very well aware of the possible interactions between different substances and the human body.

Anything that contains a cocktail of plants and/or synthetically obtained chemicals is potentially dangerous and may never be approved because it's nearly impossible to test the combination. The more they are, the harder would be to test. Not to mention that people don't volunteer themselves easily to such risky enterprises, so why would you want to become a human lab rat?

The next supplements are those not-so-healthy, but with very low risk of being really harmful. These are supplements made from plant extracts that are obtained from very special, very rare plants. They can be tested and that's a big, big plus. So what's the catch? Plants that are so rare cannot be harvested in large quantities and people who grow them or pick them from the field or forest cannot afford to be picky. This means they cannot guarantee that every batch will have the same properties because it is not possible to obtain such a standardized crop when you have very little plant mass available. Think Hoodia for example. Hoodia is great in theory, but there isn't that much of this plant growing in its home region to account for all the weight loss pills on the market.

Healthy weight loss supplements are the least glamorous of them all. They are all made from one plant only and that plant has to be common enough to grow wild over a large area and never be in danger of going extinct because of over-exploitation. There are a number of such weight loss pills and one of the newest released to the general public is Proactol?, which is made from natural, organic cactus "Opuntia ficus-indica".

This cactus is an important vegetable in modern Mexican agriculture, but it's so widely spread that in some areas it is considered a noxious weed. This plant will never go away, it is perfectly adapted to thrive on an immense geographical area and you can pick and choose between different zones and utilize only perfect plants. The extract has been extensively tested by medical authorities and it's safe for human use. And this is exactly what you should be looking for when you want a weight loss supplement that does the job and never puts your health at risk!