Nearly 40% of weight-loss advertisements make at least one statement that is totally false, and about 55% of them include at least one statement that can’t be backed up by research, according to an FTC report, which says that consumer testimonials and before-and-after photos “rarely portrayed realistic weight loss.” The FTC evaluated 300 advertisements from broadcast and cable television, infomercials, radio, magazines, newspapers, supermarket tabloids, direct mail, commercial e-mail and Internet Web sites.
They also compared 1992 ads from eight national magazines to 2001 ads in the same publications. “False or misleading claims are common in weight-loss advertising, and, based on our comparison of 1992 magazine ads with magazine ads for 2001, the number of products and the amount of advertising, much of it deceptive, appears to have increased dramatically over the last decade,” the report says. And these ads don?t just appear in sleazy supermarket tabloids?many of them were printed in mainstream magazines such as Family Circle and Cosmopolitan.
Almost all of the promised results are unsupported by scientific evidence. Examples of claims that are too good to be true are: you can lose a pound a day, you can lose weight without diet or exercise, and you can lose weight while you sleep.
We may not be able to lose our fat, but we can physically transform ourselves into more spiritual beings. Joseph Chilton Pearce tells how in ?The Biology of Transcendence,?click here.
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