Juice Plus Research Blog

From Name Witheld At User's Request (November 6, 2007)
I love your site!!! My brother’s wife is a Juice Plus distributor. She makes me loathe family get togethers because she just never shuts up about Juice Plus. She is a brainwashed idiot – she used to work as a receptionist at a gym and knows absolutely nothing about nutrition, but now she thinks she’s an expert because she read a few Juice Plus brochures and went to some of the company’s “training” seminars. She tells stories about how a friend of a friend cured this disease or that disease with Juice Plus and nobody on it ever gets sick. I’ve heard her telling people, including my friends and family, that they should get off medications their doctor prescribed and take Juice Plus instead. It makes me furious and I’m worried she’s going to end up hurting somebody, or worse. I tried talking to her about it and I’ve even shown her some of the criticism of Juice Plus that I found on the Internet but she just shrugs it off and keeps repeating phrases from the brochures

Is it actually illegal for her to promote Juice Plus for preventing diseases? I found several websites where other Juice Plus distributors are making these kinds of claims. I can’t rat out my sister-in-law to the authorities because it would cause a rift in my family, but I would love to report some of the other bastards who are saying that it can cure cancer etc. Who should I report them to and what kind of details do they need? Is it the FDA, FTC, BBB, etc.? Do I have to give my name to file a report? I don’t want my brother or his wife to hear about this. Thanks…you are doing a great job! Keep it up.

Reply From the JPRB
Sadly, that’s an all too familiar story, as you may have noticed from some of our articles and the comments of other reader’s who have responded here.

In answer to your questions:

• Implicit or explicit claims that Juice Plus can prevent, treat, cure, or mitigate the symptoms of any disease are illegal according to the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Marketing Juice Plus for such purposes means that it is being illegally promoted as a new drug in violation of section 201(g)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) [21 U.S.C. § 321(g)(1)] and section 201(p) of the Act [21 U.S.C. § 321(p)].
• Suspected violations of the Act can and should be reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. They have a very convenient online reporting form[1] or you can phone a regional complaint coordinator.[2] It only takes a few minutes to file a complaint online and any personal information provided to the FDA is considered strictly confidential.
• Identify the product as the dietary supplement Juice Plus and include in your report a quote of the offending statements (any implicit or explicit disease cure/prevention/treatment claims) and mention that the statement violates the sections of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act mentioned above. Include the URL of the webpage where the statement was found and the name and address of the distributor/website owner, if available. Provide a URL to the distributor's Juice Plus sales website if it is linked anywhere on the offending website. Statements from bulletin boards and chat rooms may be difficult to investigate but they should be reported if linked to a specific distributor’s webpage. Don’t bother reporting anything from anonymous sources. Sites with prohibited claims that are registered to or clearly identified with a particular individual(s) are easier for the FDA to investigate. If you aren’t sure who a site is registered to, you can find the site's IP and contact information by searching the URL at Network Solutions,[3] although sometimes this will just list an administrative contact for the host web service provider, rather than the identity of the person who actually operates the website. If the adverisment lists a distributor's phone number, it can often be traced to the subscriber's name and/or address using White Page's reverse phone search.[4]

References

1. U.S. Food and Drug Administration: Reporting Unlawful Sales of Medical Products on the Internet. http://www.fda.gov/oc/buyonline/buyonlineform.htm
2. U.S. Food and Drug Administration: Consumer Complaint Coordinators. http://www.fda.gov/opacom/backgrounders/complain.html
3. Network Solutions Whois Search. http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
4. White Pages Reverse Phone Search. http://www.whitepages.com/reverse-lookup