Nutraceuticals claims : Chocolate That Cures Acne, Potato Chips That Lower Cholesterol

For fear of FDA/FTC backlash, functional-food companies must exercise great care in promoting such near-miracles. But consumers are fluent in the lexicon by which thousands of new products are marketed — and old products reframed — as not just tasty but "healthy" and "scientifically proven," "according to studies," "to reduce the risk" of very specific, sometimes very deadly diseases.

Source: www.alternet.org... ou/?page=entire

Does eating cr4pfood so important that companies now include medicine int it to revamp their image? If you want to be healthy, just stay away from processed food, but that is not helping the industry, is it?

[edit on 3-8-2010 by gagol]

What they're going after is things like "Noni juice", which got around FDA regulation by claiming to be foods (some of the Ayuvedic "medicines" actually poisoned a number of people... there was a huge flap about this 5 years ago in the natural foods folks). MLM food products used to be really bad about these claims.

So there's no regulation on how much "special island juice" really IS inside that "health drink" you're taking or how strong it is. I've seen claims that this cures cancer, cures acne, cleanses colons, lowers cholesterol, and a bunch of other unbelievable things. Many times the "cures" are often contradictory (if you know your medicine and herbs) and the "studies" are really bogus.

...at least, last time I read about the regulation, this is what they were going after. I'm all for it being regulated if they say it's medicine.

I'm also VERY in favor of eating fresh foods and locally grown foods if/when you can find them!

The Byrd is the word.

It's a sad truth. Companies are using marketing strategies that play on the general ignorance of the average consumer (See Acai).

Most of these products don't produce the advertised effects, and the companies cleverly dress this by saying, "results are not typical". The other way of getting around it is by adding any specific nutrient that has been demonstrated to have health beneficial effects to an otherwise unhealthy food.

reply to post by DevolutionEvolvd


I love car analogies.

My old car's tranny is leaking some fluids so I checked for a quick repair. After lurking on many forums, most people's experience is that seal reconditioners will transform your gaskets in slush over time, thus creating more problems. But that is not indicated on the bottles, people's car had to suffer to learn that. The best thing to do is: add fluids until you can rebuild the tranny and fix the real problem.

The real problem is when you need two jobs to pay your bills leaving you with no time to take care of yourself, your health will be deteriorating and you will seek quick repairs because you do not have time to take care of it in a proper fashion.

reply to post by gagol


First of all, I suffered from severe cystic acne while I was a teenager. There is absolutely no proof that chocolate causes acne. I do know my father had the same diagnosis, and was subjected to x-ray therapy to try and cure his. He ended up with skin cancer years later, partially in part due to what Dr.'s thought would help him in his teenage years.

There is no proof that regular potato chips cause high cholesteral, although people are cautioned that they might.

What bothers me, is instead of people being instructed to eat a healthy diet, they are being told that it is ok to eat foods that are myths for some of these illnesses, anyway.

So, they eat this stuff, but still have problems is what will happen!

Nutraceuticals are like bullets filled with aspirin. It's kind of pointless