Take a look at the “advertorial” featuring Oz. Just the word “advertorial” should chill you, but there’s more! “Fat-busting”. Seriously, if ever there’s a phrase that should make you recognize that a diet pill is garbage, it’s that one. Then, in the video, Oz promises that this dietary supplement will make you lose weight with “no exercise, no dieting, no effort”, and to prove it all, he has his assistant pour a pitcher of milk and sugar into a balloon, and then he prances in front of a video wall which has animations of blobby cartoon fat cells shriveling away.
The man has no shame at all. He’s a quack pitchman for fat pills now.
First Biebs, now Oz? Ur just jelly of the swag.
“He’s a quack pitchman for fat pills now.”
Now?
ARGH. Clicked the link, and it started a cacophonous auto-play something or other and started with the popups.
A couple of effective ways to lose weight with no diet, no exercise, no effort are chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
How come Oz never mentions those?
I’ve seen some promising results with methamphetamine which has the added advantage of making you want to take more.
chigau: also intestinal parasites.
So if you loved SeaMonkeys™…
There are three easy steps to guaranteed weight loss:
1. Get more sleep.
2. Get more exercise.
3. Eat smaller quantities of a larger variety of healthier foods.
All the rest is commentary and common sense. No pills, no expensive machines, no mail-order gimmicks, no surgery, no expensive consultations; anyone who says otherwise is trying to scam you.
I propose the Brain Melt Diet™© — Watch / read rubbish like this until your brain melts and pours out of ears. Instant loss of c.1.2 kilograms!
Going to have to disagree with you, Gregory in Seattle.
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A couple of effective ways to lose weight with no diet, no exercise, no effort are chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
How come Oz never mentions those?
If his weight loss products actually worked, how could he keep selling products?
Death!
Guaranteed weight loss.
They are also the ideal pet! They go where you go and eat what you eat.
Wow this advertorial is so smart they use a picture of French news anchor Mélissa Theuriau above the name of the article ‘s author Helen Hasman. I wonder if they even have the rights to use the dr oz show?
Guaranteed weight loss. Move to Mars.
Shave with a bacon slicer. Guaranteed weight loss.
For some reason ads for Dr. Oz keep showing up in my Facebook feed. To be honest, this ad doesn’t seem any worse than anything else he sells these days. Nothing but hooey!
I just don’t understand the sort of doublethink which goes on in the minds of so many alternative medicine proponents. On the one hand they castigate modern scientific medicine for being all about money, money, money: THEY know how to cure cancer simply and easily but don’t want YOU to know about it because the cure is natural and therefore too cheap for the greedy bastards to let it get to the suffering public. This is consumerism; this is capitalism, this is what happens when you ignore Nature and Nature’s Wisdom.
But on the other hand almost all the alt med sites and alt med quacks are selling something. They read like commercials. Testimonials, testimonials, testimonials. Sweeping claims which sound too good to be true. Vague references to “eliminating toxins” and “boosting the immune system” followed by the specific reassurance that HERE is the place for you to BUY what you need. They all have a store, and it all just happens to contain what they just happen to advocate for health-reasons only. It’s Marketing 101 for charlatans.
For some reason the contradiction doesn’t seem to bother them. It’s like anyone who is “alternative” is automatically trustworthy and they’re not looking for consumers, they’re just hoping to heal.
Sastra:
I made pretty much the same argument to my dad once† (after the “YOU’RE PUTTING UNTESTED AND UNREGULATED SUPPLEMENTS INTO YOUR BODY!” argument failed spectacularly). His response? Pharmaceutical companies earn billions of dollars a year and supplement makers are the “little guys”. Yes, he honestly believes that supplement makers aren’t an industry earning millions of dollars (at least) a year in profits.
Also: Big business = bad. Small business = good. Which is how they’ve suckered so many middle-aged liberals into buying their shit.
†He was singing the praises of shark cartilage or something of that nature. It has saved his joints! Never mind that the man had no joint problems to begin with.
How stupid is that? Wasn’t the entire Interwhatsis obsessed with her a couple of years ago? I know several other forums I used to spend time on were. If these guys come up with a jingle, I’m guessing they’ll just overdub an Alizee video.
Oh look, they even have a integrative pseudoctor in their commercial. With a lab coat so saintly white, you know she speaks true!
….
SEEMS LEGIT
And since Dr. Oz looks like such a picture of health himself, I’ll be sure to buy whatever he’s shilling.
Give him a scythe and a hooded robe? Brr.
Ugh, with the weight loss scams. I’ve been being bombarded lately with ViSalus/body by vi bullshit lately. No shit if you replace two meals with 90 calorie powder mixes you’ll lose weight… but wait, you can get your mystery meal FREE if you sign up 3 more people! It’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s networked marketing! Woo! Oh, and free BMW if you become a regional director (read: get more schmucks in under you)! But we’re just trying to help people.
Sadly one of my friends is very far down this rabbit hole. What is it about people that weight loss crap seems always like the best thing ever?.
@mishcakes
There’s a metric fuckton of fat bigotry pervading this society. It’s vicious and it’s all but inescapable. It encourages people to believe that the only way to escape the stigma is to lose weight–and if they fail to do so (and about 95% do fail to maintain their weight loss for more than 5 years), they’re blamed for that failure. The pressure is intense and as much as I might hope people could rationally evaluate the evidence for the “weight loss crap”, I can understand why someone might want to take the chance on something that promised them the opportunity to be thin.
@ Form&Function
Yes, but it’s not like “eat well, eat less, exercise more” isn’t some well-guarded weight loss secret. That also offers the promise to be thin, just without the sleazy marketing. It’d be hard to not have that knowledge passed on to you at some point, whether at school, or at the gym, through PSAs and other advertisements, by family and friends, or even movies (you know, the montage scene where someone trying to get fit runs/lifts weights/eats bananas). I doubt anyone is walking around thinking “All I eat is pizza, but I want to lose weight. I am very confused about why I am in this situation”.
So it’s obviously wanting the prize without working for it, and being a poor thinker… which eventually will lead to having less in your wallet and more around your midsection, when the pill/diet/shake/etc inevitably fails you.
It’s really sad, and while I am far from the epitome of health, at least I know that I’m not a $300 shake kit away from my dream body.
Thanks to Dr. Oz, now we know that Garcinia Gambogia as good as the sensational fat buster, placebo. In addition, you get the benefit of hepatotoxicity, which I think means that you lose your appetite along with many other important features.
We should be thanking our wingless duck friend.
Was that WH thing supposed to be an article? Complete with fake comments?
And I just got a popup ad for this very product right here on FTB! I wish you guys could do something about the popups in general. I’m even getting them on my phone.