Damn.
Just when I thought I was gonna get out of "The Unhappiest Club On Earth".
< |:/~
Posted on 11/09/2004 1:04:00 PM PST by SmithL
WASHINGTON (AP) --
The government filed six lawsuits against companies it said had promised weight-loss regimens that were too good to be true, and it pressed the publications that advertised the programs to identify and reject them instead.
It was the first time the Federal Trade Commission had paired a court complaint about weight-loss products with letters to media outlets, FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said Tuesday. For now, the agency is not seeking to punish those news outlets, she added.
"We are having success, a great deal of success, with media companies in educating them about these media ads," Majoras said. "For now, we're not ready to give up."
As part of "Operation Big Fat Lie," the FTC filed six complaints in federal court -- and is working with the Maine attorney general on a seventh -- challenging ads that promoted such things as pills, powders, green tea, gels and patches for weight loss without diet or exercise.
Media outlets that have grown plump with advertising revenue from the weight-loss industry should make more effort to reject ads for bogus regimens, Platt Majoras said.
The outlets that advertised them were magazines and newspapers, including: Cosmopolitan, Woman's Own, Complete Woman, USA Weekend, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Albuquerque Journal and Spanish-language publications such as TeleRevista Magazine.
The FTC files a complaint when it has "reasons to believe" that the law has been or is being violated and it is acting in the public interest.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Damn.
Just when I thought I was gonna get out of "The Unhappiest Club On Earth".
< |:/~
Is it wrong to pray for someone to be run over by a tractor-trailer?
Darn, I was just about to "step off the scale and slip into the Cortislim lifestyle."
Get this spammer of the airwaves.
Anybody who falls for those smarmy Cortislim commercials deserves to lose money.
Is Cortislim one of the products?
Phil Hendrie is going to be bummed.
I'm glad the bogus commercials are going... but I do find it disconcerting that the publications are being held liable. It's one thing to run an ad that you know is false, but what does it take to know that the ad is false? If the advertiser says "I've got these studies which prove my claims", does the publication need to do all of the legwork to determine if the studies are from reliable sources?
Perhaps the FTC can sue Bush for falsly claiming to be a conservative.
The ads that cortaslim are currently running are very wordsmithed. "Step off the scale and into the cortaslim lifestye..." "Join us with exercise, diet, diet supplements, and cortaslim..."
Not only is cortaslim not claiming you will lose weight without diet & exercise, they are not claiming that you will lose any weight with their product.... only that you step off the scale.
smarmy.
If that ends up being the case, then most every commercial out there will fall to the wayside. They lie more often than not. New and improved, pffffft ! Blackbird.
Well I'm not so sure about that. If I'm not mistaken Corta-slim advertizes that you'll:
1. take off weight in the just right places, and
2. at a faster rate than those who don't take the diet pill
I think they used to, but aren't anymore.
you are correct. i listened to one of their radio commercials last night and noticed the absence of those previous claims. they sounded pretty fantastic...and now they're gone. whaddya know.
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