We reported a few months ago about the barrage of claims against Herbalife regarding high lead content in several of their products. After a couple months with no word about it, Herbalife has announced that the claims made by the Fraud Discovery Institute. Something smells very fishy here.
We’ve told you all about the FDI and its Founder, Barry Minkow and his determination to take Herbalife down, as well as several other MLM companies, and made claims back in May that the group had scientific proof from independent labs that Herbalife products were dangerous and contained illegal levels of lead (interestingly enough, the letter has been taken down from Fraud Discovery’s website).
Now, Herbalife and the FDI have apparently reached an agreement to avoid any further litigation, and the FDI has retracted its original claims against the nutritional supplement company. No other details of the agreement were made public. But wait a second…if you had alleged scientific proof, was it all just a lie or did FDI disappear for some other reason? Something absolutely doesn’t make sense here.
“It is evident to the Fraud Discovery Institute that Herbalife produces products that are safe, and that the company strives for continuous improvement in product quality,” the company said in a statement. Say what? Minkow has been going after Herbalife with a vengeance listing 3 separate exhibits of “proof” that Herbalife’s products contained excessive amounts of lead. In fact, there was even a lawsuit filed by a woman claiming to suffer from liver damage as a result of the products and the lawsuit broke just days after Minkow’s “findings”.
There is something VERY fishy about what is going on here. This is the second time that a company Minkow and the FDI have gone after all of a sudden reached an agreement with no public announcement of the terms. if the findings were indeed proven to be false (which we would not be surprised by) why didn’t Herbalife sue Minkow and FDI for making false claims? You cant just make claims against a company, show “proof” by “scientists” etc and then retract it after you made the press. That is absurd.
This is the second time in a short period of time that Minkow and FDI have settled against a company they were going after with no report on the settlement. Just last month, USANA reached an agreement and all of a sudden all of the negative statements Minkow and FDI were saying about that company disappeared as well. Maybe this is all in relation to the FDA cracking down on false claims made but from companies in the industry and against them but either way, Minkow is losing a lot of credibility and kudos for both USANA and Herbalife to make this noise go away.
Popularity: 6% [?]
To establish a baseline for what constitutes dangerous lead levels, FDI compared the finding in the Nu Skin lipstick against test results of other lipsticks and found that that Amber spice contain 1.12 ppm of lead, far above what other lipsticks contained.
“The FDA has no established lead law for lipstick, but I think that it is safe to assume that Nu Skin probably does not want the distinction of being the most lead-contaminated of lipsticks tested by the non-profit organization seeking to protect consumers from dangerous products,” said Barry Minkow, co-founder of the Fraud Discovery Institute.
