Taking Advantage of People: Airborne

I was listening to a podcast that was discussing in part how celebrities are listened to for medical advice; in particular, Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccination tirades. The woman has no medical training and yet an endorsement from Oprah somehow makes her qualified as an authority figure for medical advice.

That got me to thinking about other things that are successfully marketed despite the information available publicly that the claims are baloney; they're successful because people want them to be true, and because of this the people making these products knowingly take advantage of the public. It's really quite disgusting.

Case in point: Airborne.

I was thinking of this because, oddly enough, I was in Walmart shortly after listening to said podcast dropping off a prescription and I saw this medication in the aisle. You've probably heard of it. It's a supplement that is supposed to fight off colds and flu, invented by a school teacher (being an elementary school teacher somehow carries over into being qualified to market medications...probably because there's an association between a room of kids and being covered in bacteria and virus laden snot, I suppose).

Now, the fact that they've been sued and lost over claims to their health effects should probably warn people about using it. From Wikipedia, the Federal Trade Commision sued them over false advertising and the company ended up paying 23 million dollars and another 7 million in class-action lawsuits.

Shouldn't it throw a warning flag up when the lab that supposedly tested the product turned out to be a two-man company created for the sole purpose of testing that one product?

Moreover, because it's marketed as an dietary supplement and not a drug there's no federal oversight on the claims made by the manufacturer...it's perfectly legal for them to knowingly sell something that is essentially a placebo. Worse, if you follow the directions you are overdosing on vitamin C which can cause other side effects with your kidneys.

I looked at the label on one of the Airborne products; you can see it here, on Amazon, for $17 (three 10-tablet tubes). Yum, zesty orange! Some facts (click nutrition information):

• One pill has 10% recommended intake of sodium. You're taking 10% of your recommended intake of salt with each pill. The instructions tell you to take it every three hours. Is that good?
• It has 2.8 mg Riboflavin
• 8 mg zinc
• 3 mg manganese
• 15 mcg selenium
• 5000IU vitamin A
• 1000 mg vitamin C
• 40 mg magnesium
• The rest are an herbal blend, which have no scienfic proof of being effective at healing or preventing disease.

All that for 30 tablets in this package for $17.

Let's look at a Centrum multivitamin, okay?

• According to the label off Amazon, there's no sodium.
• 1.7 mg riboflavin
• 15 mg zinc
• 2 mg manganese
• 20 mcg selenium
• 3500IU vitamin A
• 60 mg vitamin C (which is 100% of the recommended allowance)
• 100 mg Magnesium

And of course Centrum has a slew of other minerals and vitamins. This 250 pill bottle is $18.

$18 for 250 pills...versus $17 for 30 doses. And the Centrum has more minerals and vitamins in it. Hmm...

The real difference is that Airborne has herbs in it that haven't actually been shown to do anything, and before you poo-poo me for being anti-herbals, keep in mind that the company that makes Airborne commissioned a lab that consisted of two guys that had nothing to do with medicine (the "lab" was incorporated only to test this product, and they had no doctors, no researchers, nothing...ABC news discovered this in 2006). They never actually had any evidence that their own pills are actually effective under lab conditions. That should make your critical thinking caps start burning.

Sadly the sales of these things are still astronomical. It's a hugely expensive subset of what you get in a plain multivitamin (although...as I stated before...it has a dangerous level of vitamin C in it, which can HURT YOUR KIDNEYS as well as affect your absorbtion of other minerals in the body) for much less money.

I'm seriously beginning to wonder if I'm a stupid person for not coming up with my own supplement concoction and selling it to an unsuspecting public. I could even bypass the whole claims thing from a fake lab so I can avoid bad publicity when skeptics like myself start digging into facts and tell people about the truth...