OpTree

The Herbalife lawsuit just keeps getting worse…..In an unprecedented legal action, the attorney for the woman suing Herbalife over health problems she says was caused by the company’s Dietary Supplements, Christopher Grell, has expanded the scope of his lawsuit by adding a new group of defendants- the plaintiff’s “up-line distributors.”

The current suit against the company is seeking damages for fraud and product negligence.
Grell says that they will go after multiple “defendants” who were in the up-line of his client and will keep adding new defendants as the discovery portion of the case moves along.

Herbalife announced over a week ago that independent lab tests showed that the company’s products were in compliance with Proposition 65 which maintains safety as far as lead levels in dietary and nutritional supplements. Although the company claimed they had tests to prove this, no documents were ever released. Grell has since won a motion to get those test results. In the last week and a half, we have heard nothing from Herbalife, and now this case is expanding getting a lot worse for Herbalife.

While I think its important to maintain the quality and safety of the products, it seems a bit unfair to sue the distributors in the up-line. Those distributors only go by the information provided by their company. Distributors cannot be expected to run their own experiments to determine the efficacy or safety of products provided to them by the company. Hopefully Herbalife will find a way to settle this lawsuit quickly and can also provide results from scientific tests that back up their claim that their products are safe. Distributors from the company should not be held responsible for the company’s mistakes.

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Herbalife released an official statement this weekend rebutting the claims made by the “Fraud Institute of America” saying that independent lab tests have confirmed that Herbalife products do NOT contain unsafe levels of lead.

In a recent compliant made by Barry Minkow and his Fraud Discovery Institute, Minkow cited two studies which claimed that 6 products sold by Herbalife contained dangerous amounts of Lead. Herbalife called that information “inaccurate and misleading” and went on to say that “there was never any health or safety issue with Herbalife products. The statement was sent out via e-mail.

Herbalife Chief Scientific Officer Steve Henig said in the statement that many natural and processed foods, “as well as our products, which are made with natural ingredients, contain extremely small amounts of naturally occurring lead that can be detected by today’s highly sensitive analytical methods but are insignificant in posing any risk to consumers.”

Herbalife has retested its products at independent labs in both the US (Covance) and Europe (Eurofins) and all products were proved to be compliant with all laws and regulations pertaining to health and safety standards.

The complaint made by the FDI and Minkow, was supposedly sent to the California’s Attorney Generals office, but Herbalife Spokeswoman, Barbara Henderson has said that to the best of her knowledge, nobody at the company has been contacted by the state of California, but added, that if contacted, the company would be happy to speak to anyone.

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