Freelife Goji

Talking to a local about web sites this morning, and he mentions there is a ‘business opportunity’ I might be interested in. The MLM alarm bells started ringing.. sure enough I’m soon hearing ‘unique product’ and ‘miraculous health properties’. He gives me his web address – a freelife.com address.. Goji juice!

Sure enough, it doesn’t take much digging on Google to uncover the elements of a scam. Wendy Mesley, a reporter from CBC Canada did an indepth story on the Freelife Goji which completely blows it apart. http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2007/01/goji.html

Goji or ‘wolfberries’ do have health-promoting properties, but the way Freelife markets the product, and the false claims that it cures cancer and so forth is just wrong. I feel sorry for the man in the CBC report who had spent thousands of dollars on the product for his father, sick with cancer – to find out it was all a bunch of over-inflated, unproven marketing hype.

A couple of months ago my friend Melissa got into glyco-nutritional dietary supplements. She claims the product has made a difference to her health and told me about the remarkable transformation of a girl with Downs Syndrome. She gave me some links to information: http://www.glycostory.com, http://glyco101.com, and http://glycoscience.org. The three sites seem full of a lot of confusing scientific claims, but how well do they stand up to close scrutiny? In the words of Dr Ray Sahelian:

I start suspecting that there is something not right about the promotion of a product – such as glyconutrients – when the meaning of the word is so ambiguous, and the word glyconutrient is created by a company that sells through multilevel marketing channels.

Dr Sahelian found there were no legitimate studies to support the claims, it is all marketing hype. Sound familiar? The multi-level marketing element – just screams dodgy. They might be selling a beneficial product but they need to be honest. The hype and the untruths build people’s hopes and turn it into one big scam.