Herbalife Is Not Nutrition

Herbalife changed their name.

“Our new name, Herbalife Nutrition, reflects our strategic transformation as a leader in the nutrition industry.”

They’ve strategically transformed into a leader in nutrition. But they don’t sell food; they sell food replacements isolated from commodity crops and industrialized into unnatural pills and powders. It’s the opposite of everything that science, and life, has to tell us about nutritiousness.

The Annals of Internal Medicine

The large body of accumulated evidence has important public health and clinical implications. Evidence is sufficient to advise against routine supplementation, and we should translate null and negative findings into action. The message is simple: Most supplements do not prevent chronic disease or death, their use is not justified, and they should be avoided.

The New York Times: Studies Show Little Benefit in Supplements

Americans spend more than $30 billion a year on dietary supplements — vitamins, minerals and herbal products, among others — many of which are unnecessary or of doubtful benefit to those taking them.

The International Journal of Preventive Medicine

The results of large-scale randomized trials show that, for the majority of the population, there is no overall benefit from taking MVM supplements. Indeed, some studies have shown increased risk of cancers in relation to using certain vitamins.

The New York Times: Older Americans Are ‘Hooked’ on Vitamins

The National Institutes of Health has spent more than $2.4 billion since 1999 studying vitamins and minerals. Yet for “all the research we’ve done, we don’t have much to show for it,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute.

“Vitamins are not inert,” said Dr. Eric Klein, a prostate cancer expert at the Cleveland Clinic who led the vitamin E study. “They are biologically active agents. We have to think of them in the same way as drugs. If you take too high a dose of them, they cause side effects.”

Supplements aren’t helpful but can be harmful.

Herbalife sells its supplements to its distributors as part of a business opportunity. Business opportunity participants are told that they must “be a product of the product.” Financial success in the business opportunity is to be built on a foundation of product consumption.

The Herbalife Nutrition regimen has users substituting Herbalife soy isolate shakes for two of their daily meals, and taking handfuls of dubious, but expensive, supplements throughout the day. Distributors post pictures of their shakes and pill boxes across social media.

These are some of the captions that were associated with the pictures in this post.

These tablets changed my life and I have a special relationship with each and everyone one of them!!!!!!

After our Shake and Tea we have our #HerbalifeTablets… They are key to staying healthy and feeling amazing!

You have to use the products to talk about the products.

This is so that I am in wellness forever, I will never need to have medicine.

Tablets fill in the gaps where food can’t #herbalife

I purchase at LEAST 600 volume points or more products every month FOR MYSELF… I was sure to use as much money as possible to using my Herbalife products and that has been a very small investment into building a global business!

These days we have to supplement to get the nutrients our body needs that it can’t get from food!

Tablet box = FULL
Before i used to see the leader’s tablet box full, and it was only a dream for me. I’d think to myself “i want a tablet box that full.” Today, thank God it has become a reality for me. FULL TABLET BOX!

No one has ever tested the healthfulness of taking daily handfuls of random supplements in a quasi-religious effort to achieve a fraudulently advertised financial success. But if it were possible to conduct such a crazy study, one imagines that the outcome would be quite conclusive and that the abstract might read something like…

Abstract

Don’t do it.¹