Marshall Brain's Blog

PopSci has an article this month on the Science claims made by manufacturers. 106 claims are noted in a typical day, meaning that a normal person hears a science claim about once every 10 minutes -- mostly from advertisements.

Most of the claims are wrong in one way or another. Two of the more amusing are these:

• An ad for milk claims that the cows, "graze freely on lush natural pastures as nature intended." The author notes: "Nature never 'intended' humans to drink cow milk, nor to place cattle or pasture land in upstate New York. Cows descend from the wild aurochs, a now-extinct native of Persia, and were bred and imported by humans who made pastures by clear-cutting the thick forests that had blanketed this land for eons."
  
  
• An ad for Cortislim claims that it helps with weight loss by controling the hormone cortisol. This hormone is released in stressful situations and, according to the ad, causes you to store fat. Cortislim claims to control the hormone to eliminate fat. University of Virginia endocrinologist Mary Vance, after "perusing the ingredients listed on the company's Web site, says: 'You might as well eat tree bark.'"

I hear the ad for Cortislim once or twice every day right now. Given the number of ads they are running, Cortislim must be making millions of dollars selling useless tree bark. Why do we allow companies to do that?