Home
Archive
Newsletters
Video
Blogs
Discuss
About
Search
Donate
Advertise

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

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted August 24, 2009.


Those expensive juices with exotic ingredients promise a healthy body and a fat income. But can they pull you through a recession and a health-care crisis?

Share and save this post:

      

      

Share on Facebook       

AlterNet Social Networks:
follow us on twitter
find us on Facebook

In Special Coverage

Belief:
Why I Want to Turn Religious People Into Atheists
Greta Christina

Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
4 Myths About Taxes, Debunked
Paul Buchheit

DrugReporter:
The War on Weed: Marijuana Is Basically Harmless -- The Monumentally Stupid Drug War Is Not
Jim Hightower

Environment:
White House Garden Won't Make Up for Obama's Nomination of Pesticide Lobbyist for US Chief Agriculture Negotiator
Jill Richardson

Food:
Don't Be Scared of Food: Are We Being Needlessly Hysterical About Food Safety?
David E. Gumpert

Health and Wellness:
47,000 Women Could Die As a Result of the New Mammogram Guidelines
George Lakoff

Immigration:
Hate Group, FAIR, Is Looking for "Ethnically Ambiguous" Actors to Amplify Its Racism
Adam Luna

Media and Technology:
The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives
Mark Ames

Movie Mix:
The Yes Men: Pranksters Out to Fix the World
Mark Engler

Politics:
White House's Ties to Health Care Industry Deeper Than Visitor Records Show
Daniela Perdomo

Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Why Can't We Look Away From Sarah Palin?
Vanessa Richmond

Rights and Liberties:
Citing "National Defense Needs," Obama Administration Says it Won't Sign Ban on Land Mines
Amy Goodman

Sex and Relationships:
Hot Mormon Muffins and Models for Jesus: What's With All the Sexy Christians?
Liz Langley

Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders

Water:
Poseidon's Financial Shell Game: Why Is a Private Desalination Plant Asking for Public Money?
Peter Gleick

World:
Is Obama Following in the Footsteps of Bill Clinton?
Jeff Cohen

More stories by Stan Cox

Advertisement
Upcoming AlterNet stories on Digg

"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.

To avoid trouble with the FDA, company officials are careful to make no specific claims that their juice mixtures prevent or cure disease, and the legally binding agreements signed by distributors bar them from making such claims.

But, say critics, if the pitches being tossed around by distributors in living rooms and church basements across the country are to be believed, there's no ailment that just a couple of ounces of superjuice a day can't fix:

  • A CBS affiliate in Los Angeles took hidden cameras into a Tahitian Noni Juice recruitment session in Orange County and recorded claims that the juice could be used to treat AIDS, lupus, dementia and even severe burns.
  • The man who developed the original formula for Himalayan Goji Juice, Earl Mindell, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 2007 that his elixir could "probably prevent 75 percent of breast cancer from occurring" if all women drank it.
  • FDA sent a warning to XanGo in 2006 about brochures claiming the juice could be used in treating hardening of the arteries, bacterial infection, glaucoma, cataracts, gum disease, obesity, diabetes and depression. XanGo responded that one of its distributors, not the company itself, had produced the offending materials.
  • A Florida doctor named Lou Niles was captured on video promoting MonaVie, saying that when he "threw this juice into the protocol" for his end-stage cancer patients, it had "a tremendous effect." He speaks of having recruited his patients and their relatives and friends as distributors, a move that was for them, he says, "an act of last resort, sort of."
  • A lawsuit filed last year against MonaVie by the home-products MLM giant Quixtar (formerly Amway) accuses MonaVie distributors of touting the juice as a treatment for cancer, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, colitis, multiple sclerosis, spinal scoliosis, high blood pressure, poor eyesight, macular degeneration, migraines, autism, Lyme's disease, gout, Parkinson's disease, Graves disease, hangovers and even the phantom-limb pain suffered by amputees.

(MonaVie, like XanGo, emphasizes that independent distributors are instructed not to make false claims and that if they do so, it is the distributors, not company employees, who are at fault. But Quixtar maintains in its suit that "MonaVie's failure to prevent such misrepresentations and permitting their distributors to use MonaVie's trademarks and symbols when making the misrepresentations cloaks its distributors with apparent authority. MonaVie has given its distributors carte blanche to hold themselves out as MonaVie itself.")


Digg!    Share on facebook   submit to reddit    Bookmark on Delicious   Stumble This  

See more stories tagged with: superjuice, noni, monovie, pyramid scheme

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was just published by Pluto Press.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »


Advertisement
Advertisement

 

You've chosen to turn comments off for the entire site. Would you like to turn them back on?
  • AlterNetYour turn

Support AlterNet
Do you value the information you're getting from AlterNet? Please show your support with a tax-deductible donation.


Feedback
Tell us how we're doing.

Advertisement
Advertisement