Fake Credentials Used to Promote Dietary Product

These days, the market for weight loss products is seemingly insatiable. Who hasn't heard of Nutri Systems, Weight Watchers, hoodia pills, the Patch, and Dexatrim? A number of these products have been on the market for a number of years and appear to have produced results and satisfied customers. At least on the Nutri System plan, you could actually see Don Shula deliver his sales talk. Internet hype claims that Oprah endorses hoodia, but this has yet to be substantiated.

Because we are going to pick apart the preposterous claims being made by Acai Berry marketers, it is important to make one connection between the hoodia pills and the Acai Berry pills. The Oprah-hoodia connection is claimed only due to an article written in the Oprah magazine in July of 2005. In that article, hoodia claims to have been derived from "deep in the heart of Southern Africa's Kalahari Desert." In similar fashion, the Acai Berry is "harvested in the rainforests of Brazil." The Oprah magazine article continues: "For thousands of years, the Bushmen have turned to spiny plants called Hoodia to stave off hunger and thirst during long treks across sparse terrain." This sounds like the stuff that comes out of urban legends. In similar fashion, Acai Berry promoters say about the Acai Berry, that "hidden within its royal purple pigment is the magic that makes it nature's perfect energy fruit." To close out the Oprah-hoodia connection, the hoodia pill promoters are simply claiming an Oprah connection because of an article that appeared in Oprah magazine; there is no direct Oprah endorsement, nor was the article written by Oprah. The pattern with these weight-loss products seems to be that the more exotic the location from which the product can claim to have been found, the more likely promoters of it can make the case for them to work, without any scientific evidence. A carefully constructed legend claiming mystical properties of hoodia and the acai berry working in some other faraway place on the globe can apparently enable marketers to bypass normal critical thinking and due diligence that a person might otherwise exercise, in deciding whether the Acai Berry pills or the hoodia pills are right for them.

Now, let's return to the "endorsements" that these diet products have. We have already mentioned that the hoodia pills, while claiming some sort of indirect Oprah endorsement or discussion, were never directly mentioned by Oprah. The Acai Berry hype, circulating on the internet, claims the endorsement of the American Health Association, the American Diet Institute, and some other entity called American Dietary. In some cases, marketers of the Acai Berry pills simply reference the "AHA," encouraging the prospective buyer to make the leap into thinking that the acronym stands for "American Health Association." The American Health Association, in their mission statement, states as their primary objective, the goal of finding the same cost of medical care for uninsured medical treatment recipients as for those who have insurance. Nowhere in their web site is there any kind of endorsement, implied or otherwise, for Acai Berry pills. The use of American Dietary as an endorser, gives one the impression that the rest of the name of the organization may have been left out in order to cover their tracks if they get called on the use of this one. And the American Diet Institute simply doesn't exist. Even assuming the Acai Berry pills do at least some of what their promoters claim, they have struck out three times, to use a baseball analogy, in claiming third-party endorsements for their product.

It seems the latest celebrity endorsements used by the Acai Berry marketers are pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the Golden Globe Awards. At least with the hoodia pills, an article about them at least appeared in Oprah magazine. No claims have been made yet stating whether Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie made any direct comments about the Acai Berry pills. A link next to pictures of these two celebrities allows you to play a short video in which a number of newscasters talk about Acai Berry drinks being the latest health food rage at $40 a bottle. Claims were made about Oprah and Matthew McConaughey allegedly using an Acai Berry product, but no direct statements from them were quoted.

A recent e-mail blast promoting Acai Berry pills stated that they were being offered "free," if the buyer would pay $4.87 for shipping and handling. When navigating to the order form, it continued to claim that a trial sample would only cost $4.87 for S & H. Once a buyer decides against the trial, a "live agent" window appears in which the price is suddenly reduced to $1.87 S & H. The "live agent" window appears to be someone personally chatting with the buyer about buying the product under this new, reduced S & H price. What isn't disclosed anywhere, except in the Terms and Conditions link, is the fact that it is a ten-day trial, and takes two to three weeks for them to ship this amazing product to you. Note that the Terms and Conditions section states that "if you don't cancel 10 days after you order your sample, you are automatically enrolled" in the convenient home delivery plan which costs $74.61 per MONTH on your credit card, which YOU have to cancel. So picture the result: you've bought into the hype, you've charged the $1.87 or $4.87 to your credit card, it takes two to three weeks to receive the product, but you only have ten days after you've placed the order to stop the automatic recurring $74.61 charge to your credit card! Some free trial! If the Acai Berry pills are that good, why not tell people up front that they can try it for $1.87, and then IF they like it, they can continue to buy them for $74.61 a month?

This product seems to have all the appeal of the old snake oil sold in the old West. Whether they work or not, appears to be in the mind of the consumer. The marketers of this product seem more intent on building up your belief in the product before you try it, under the guise that you'll "flush out 50 pounds" (notice they did not say "you will lose 50 pounds!"), when the only thing getting lighter is your wallet. Since miracle weight loss products seem to spring up periodically, perhaps we can see if the next great dietary product claims to be from the polar ice caps, was only used by Eskimos who had to endure a long winter without anything to eat, and was mined from deep beneath the earth's surface in the only place where the substance used in the weight loss product is known to exist. The only limit to the effectiveness of some of these miracle dietary aids or products seems to be your imagination, and, unfortunately, your wallet.