Buy Walking VideosLife Support Diet?
I saw this advertisement on Facebook the other day and it made me crinkle my brow. It says:
Drop 20lb for summer
Try Life Support Diet and lose up to 20 pounds in 6 weeks. Recommended by Oprah.
I clicked over to the site and it was for Life Support Herbal and Hoodia diet pills. Here is a screenshot of their site.
Now, the advertisement said that a diet was recommended by Oprah, but all they showed is that O Magazine had written a little blurb about hoodia saying that it “may” help you lose weight. In fact, all their “Featured in” mentions had NOTHING to do with Life Support Herbal and their product. They only mentioned hoodia.
Firstly, the cactus, hoodia gordonii, has not been proven to help you lose weight. The Wikipedia entry on Hoodia gordonii sums it up perfectly:
There is no published scientific evidence that Hoodia works as an appetite suppressant in humans. The safety and/or effectiveness of Hoodia Gordonii as a dietary supplement must thus be considered as unsubstantiated.
While the cactus hasn’t been proven to help you lose weight, there is absolutely NO proof that some pill that says it contains hoodia could help you lose weight. Just because a news program talked about hoodia doesn’t mean it’s a miracle drug. Just because O Magazine wrote an article about hoodia doesn’t mean that it’s recommended by Oprah.
Secondly, Life Support Diet? Really? You’re going to name yourself Life Support? When I read their name, I immediately thought of my grandma after her stroke on life support. They fed her through a tube that ran through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach. When it was obvious that she was never going to recover, they took her OFF the life support diet. It’s not really an image of health and vitality to go on a life support diet.
There are tiny ads for weight loss pills like these EVERYWHERE on the Internet, even on Starling Fitness. Just based on the fact that I write about health and fitness, ads for products like these show up on my site. Don’t believe them.
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May 22nd, 2008 at 7:28 am
When sending money to someone you don’t know online, it’s a good idea to do a “whois” on their website, to see who it is. If you don’t have a phone number for the business or a snail-mail address, it can be hard to get satisfaction if they cheat you.
In the case of that site, the domain is registered to “Domain Privacy Group, Inc.” to hide the identity of the people operating the site. It’s also noteworthy that the domain was first registered May 4, 2007. If someone has been around for five or ten years, it’s a little more likely that the outfit is legit.
For instance, starling-fitness.com has been around since December 2004, and is registered to Michael Moncur, who has a real snail mail address and a real phone number.
If you do a google on “hoodia site:fda.gov”, you will find a bunch of links to letters that the FDA has sent to people, warning them that making claims like “Reduces your calorie intake by suppressing your appetite!”, “Eat less and lose weight” and “Stimulant free and completely safe” is patently illegal. That’s marketing the product as a drug, and hoodia doesn’t meet the standards of the FDA as a safe and effective medication.
You will find a link to “whois” at any domain registry site. You probably will have to do a CAPTCHA to get the answer – that is, you’ll probably see a box with distorted letters and/or numbers, that you have to type in. (That’s to prevent automated queries by spammers.)
And, as Laura points out, anyone can buy ads from Google, and those ads can show up anywhere. Don’t trust them simply because you trust Google, or you trust the site that is running the ad.
January 16th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Sadly people are sucked into the idea of the “magic” pill every day. The cold hard reality is, it takes commitment,dedication,a solid plan as well as a complete lifestyle change to lose weight and maintain it. There are no magic pills…as much as wish there were!