'Superjuices' Touted as Cures for Cancer, Swine Flu and the Recession -- Are They Dangerous Scams?

"They sold considerable quantities of the elixir of life, performed many cures, and recruited their finances ... Gold flowed into their coffers faster than they could count it." -- Charles MacKay, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," 1852 (writing of the 18th-century swindlers Joseph Balsamo and Lorenza Feliciana)

The unemployment rate is climbing toward 10 percent, underemployment has hit 1 in 6 members of the U.S. workforce, and more than 60 percent of bankruptcies are now linked to medical bills. But you don't have to wait for the government to fix the economy.

You can give yourself a job and give jobs to your friends and family members as well, while building up protection against chronic diseases and ruinous medical crises. You'll no longer be exploited by corporate retailers and employers or ripped off by greedy pharmaceutical companies. You can think globally and earn locally ...

Or that's the impression you'll get from listening to superjuice promoters, anyway. Their lavishly packaged, exotic extracts, sold as nutritional supplements via multilevel marketing (MLM) systems, are said to be packed with antioxidants and other healthful compounds. They sell at a retail price of $35 to $45 per 25.5-ounce bottle.

Multilevel marketing -- also known as "network marketing" by proponents, and "product-based pyramid schemes" by critics -- built the Amway, Mary Kay, Tupperware, and Herbalife empires. But the superjuices, led by companies such as MonaVie LLC, XanGo LLC, Tahitian Noni International Inc., Zrii LLC and Freelife International Inc., have cooked up a new recipe that is energizing the MLM industry with billions of dollars per year.

The recipe is straightforward: Create a deeply pigmented blend of liquids; include among the ingredients a strange fruit from an distant land that contains unfamiliar biochemical compounds; bottle it like an expensive wine, or perhaps energetically with curves and colors, or sumptuously, as for a Mughal ruler's secret potion; affix a steep price tag; make expansive but nonspecific claims for improved well-being; bundle it with the promise of a fat, durable income stream; and turn loose a hierarchy of distributors to hard-sell the juice-income bundle.

In an advisory, the Federal Trade Commission provided this concise description of multilevel marketing: "These plans typically promise that if you sign up as a distributor, you will receive commissions -- for both your sales of the plan's goods or services and those of other people you recruit to join the distributors." Those "other people" form a pyramid-shaped group known as your "downline" in the MLM world.

The Direct Selling Association (DSA) publishes figures showing that the MLM industry tends to grow at its fastest when the national economy is doing badly. That, the New York Times reports, is exactly what's happening during the current recession.

Why is the MLM model attractive just now? According to the Times, "People may use their earnings to pay off specific debts like credit cards or as a way to bring in cash while they -- or their spouses -- look for jobs."

Let's first examine the health claims being made by superjuice distributors and then ask whether selling the juices through multilevel marketing can provide enterprising people with a means to survive this recession and the "jobless recovery" to follow.

The Formula

Each of the major superjuices includes an exotic fruit or berry that is reputed to be healthful but that you can't just go buy by the pound at the local U.S. supermarket: Xango uses mangosteen, a tree fruit from Southeast Asia; Tahitian Noni's key ingredient is the noni berry, which grows in Asia and on Pacific islands; Zrii's is the amla fruit of India; Freelife makes Himalayan Goji Juice and Gochi juice with the goji berry, a native of north central China (far from the Himalayas, by the way); MonaVie's juice mixtures include the açaí berry from the Amazon basin.