Good news, folks. No need to worry about anything anymore. Not your health. Not your spouse's. Or even your kids. So let's all give a shout out to the fine people at RenewLife. They've got your whole family covered!
The number of products that the company is offering to head off your demise is astounding, but perhaps none more so than Smokers’ Cleanse™. Yep, you've got it right. Doesn't matter whether you've smoked more Camels than you can find in the Gobi desert. Your good friends at RenewLife are gonna make sure that your lungs are cleansed.
The company's website makes some intriguing claims about its product:
- A targeted, 3-part cleansing program made with specially selected herbs and natural ingredients designed to support lung and respiratory health.*
- It may also help reduce your desire to smoke,
- Soothe bronchial passages
- Support healthy stress response
- Improve your overall well-being.*
Damn! This must be some incredible stuff, no? It's not only going to clean your lungs but also help lung function, reduce your desire to smoke while at the same time making your bronchial passages feel just divine and offer you a stress-free life, which will make you one with the universe.
What could possibly be in this box that will help you achieve respiratory nirvana?
It's a little hard to see, so I've taken the liberty of magnifying the ingredients list.
PART 1 consists of 30 vegetable capsules (we do not know which vegetables)
PART 2 consists of 60 chewable tablets (we do not know if these contain vegetables)
PART 3 consists of 30 more vegetable capsules (we do not know which vegetables or if they are chewable)
Amazing, no? A box of 120 capsules, which contains an unknown amount of unknown vegetables of unknown consistency is going to either undo the damage that 30 years of smoking has done to your lungs and also help you stop smoking.
(This also raises an interesting question: If this stuff is going to rid your lungs of smoke, why bother quitting at all. Why not just keep sucking down three packs of coffin nails every day and just either chew (or swallow - not clear yet) a vegetable capsule?)
Welcome to the supplements industry. I have been regularly criticized by companies and individuals for my bias against dietary supplements, and been asked to engage in discussions with industry representatives to find a "common ground" where we could somehow agree to select the good from the bad. Well, guess what? As long as nonsense like this is being sold online, there is no "good and bad," just bad.
And RenewLife gets away with it with the mighty asterisks. You have to look hard to see them. See? OK, maybe not. I added the red arrows.
... which mean.
Oh, you can't see those other. What a coincidence. Try this instead:
- Of course, you know that this is the standard disclaimer which, thanks to the nonsensical 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), a calamity which I have written about many times before (1). People complain about drug companies doing this and charging that, but somehow it's perfectly OK to put ground up broccoli florets into a gelatin capsule and convince a bunch of suckers that this is going to stop them from getting lunch cancer. Disgusting. At the very least RenewLife should modify the box to give the product a shred of honesty.
NOTE:
(1) See:
Josh Bloom
Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science
Dr. Josh Bloom, the Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science, comes from the world of drug discovery, where he did research for more than 20 years. He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry.
