MLM Absurdities: The "Big Placebo" industry that markets nutritional supplement woo

Dietary supplements Do they actually improve your health?
(Photo credit: Andrei Z)

In studying the network marketing industry, MLM Skeptic had come to a conclusion that most network marketing companies deal with nutritional supplements and skin care, or as the somewhat pejorative slang goes: "lotions and potions".

The "potions and lotions" often promise some very vague and generalized health effects, with weasel descriptions such as:

• Support your "stem cell physiology" (Huh? What does that mean?)
• Leading expert on importance of brain health (a chiropractor)

Recently I came upon a quote by Richard Dawkins, and found it very applicable here:

If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests. 

The same applies to any sort of nutritional supplement, really. If any nutritional supplement is properly scientifically tested and proved to be effective, it will be adopted as national or even global nutritional standard. And it's clear that except for a few select examples, most nutritional supplements on the market are just woo, as they have not been tested properly, or have failed its tests to be effective in something.

So why do these nutritional supplements proliferate, and can be found in supermarkets and pharmacies and more?

The reason is quite troubling, as this has to do with growing scientific IGNORANCE and science denial.

MLM Absurdities: Once a Woo Peddler, Always a Woo Peddler?

Penta Water: proven woo on multiple contients (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was just reading a review of "Nature's Sunshine" nutritional supplement MLM on Oz's BehindMLM when I spotted a name I never thought I'd see again: Penta Water.

For those of you who don't know, Penta Water is woo... it claims to be ultrapure water that somehow is "better" for you, with some buzzwords like "improved cell survivability" and other random junk jargon, coupled with WTF? claims like "using these in medical tests improves test accuracy"... But they'll gladly sell you bottles of it for you to drink (at a premium, of course, at prices higher than even Evian water). It was so bull****, the British ad supervisory agency shut them down for making false claims.  It's so notorious, it has its own Wikipedia page.

James Randi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And in the US, it attracted the attention of no less than James Randi, probably the best known skeptic in the world, and the entire skeptic community in debunking their bull****. James Randi has long offered a prize of $1 million dollars of any evidence of paranormal supernatural, or occult occurances, abilities, or products... under proper observing conditions (i.e. reproducible). To date it had NOT been claimed even once. Penta Water was at one time announced that they will try for the prize, then wiffle-waffled, then tried t
o stipulate that they want to use their machine, which JREF said fine, as long as you can detect 37 out of 50 random users that drank your Penta Water. Then after a while, Penta Water stopped responding altogether, claiming it can't find a representative to oversee the test.

And the head of Penta Water was Gregory L. Probert.

Apparently, Mr. Probert had been pushing woo for a while, as he's now head of "Nature's Sunshine", after Penta Water went... down the drain (so to speak).