It’s easy to feel superior reading stories of our ancestors buying worthless potions from snake oil salesmen.  But a stroll though the aisles of any warehouse style store proves that nothing much has changed.  Every other end cap features a small TV making a pitch for some magic pill or potion that’s long on hype and short on effectiveness.

I don’t keep close track of health woo, but it appears to run on fads just like pop music. A while ago Melatonin was the Britney Spears of their psudo-science.  Acai berries are now Lady Ga Ga.

The ingredients change but the claims remain the same.  On a recent trip through BJs Wholesale club I was subjected to videos claiming some secret combination of herbs and spices would:

• Melt away belly fat.  Nonsense.  You can burn fat, but you can’t target specific areas.
• Cleanse and flush your system.  I think this “works” by making people feel miserable for days.  When it’s over they feel great because they’ve stopped taking the crap that was making them feel lousy.  It would be cheaper, and just as effective, to go to the tool section, buy a hammer, and repeatedly whack yourself in the head with it.  When you were finished at least you’d have a hammer.
• Slow the aging process.  The only way to do that is by accelerating to near light speed, which is difficult to do with pomegranate juice.
• Run fast, jump high.  Oh, wait, that was sneakers, about a million years ago.

I find this nonsense more amusing than upsetting, figuring that a fool as his money were lucky to get together in the first place.  The law on supplements tells the FDA to ignore these clowns as long as their packaging contains a disclaimer buried somewhere in the tiny print saying that the claims aren’t verified.  So the FDA ignores these blatant charlatans to go after dangerous stuff like walnuts.

Yep, walnuts.

The FDA notified Diamond Walnuts they’ve classified their nuts {insert your own juvenile testicular joke here*} as a drug.  Diamond made a few true statements about the health benefits of walnuts on their website (not on their packaging), which got the FDAs undies in a bunch.  Among them:

“Studies indicate that the omega-3 fatty acids found in walnuts may help lower cholesterol; protect against heart disease, stroke and some cancers; ease arthritis and other inflammatory diseases; and even fight depression and other mental illnesses.”

“The omega-3s found in fish oil are thought to be responsible for the significantly lower incidence of breast cancer in Japanese women as compared to women in the United States.”

Note the careful working – studies indicate, may help, are thought to be . . . unlike bold claims on the modern day snake oil.  Even without the careful weasel wording the statements are true.

But the FDA says those true statements transforms walnuts from tasty snack into a drug.  I feel I need to repeat that, because it’s so ridiculous and stupid you might think I was joking the first time.

So if you want to sell ridiculous crap like this on a web site that doesn’t contain a single true statement, you have nothing to worry about.  But if you want to talk about the real benefits of your real healthy food, you better watch your nuts.

*I figured I’d save you the trouble.

Hat Tip