Weight-loss ad found to be misleading by ASA

A WEIGHT-loss product distributor has been found to have been misleading consumers – an increasingly common problem in South Africa, according to the doctor who complained about an advert for Body2Tone.

Body2Tone, a weight-loss pill with the slogan “No empty promises just results!”, did not have sufficient evidence to back up several of its claims on its website, according to the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa.

The ASA ruled on Monday that Body2Tone’s distributors, Natural Body Distribution, had not responded to the complaint with a report from an independent, credible expert to back up claims that its product would “burn fat, increase energy, improve metabolism” or “reduce cravings and control appetite”.

The company could also not prove that a quoted testimonial from a Dr Jacques Lotz was in fact from a registered doctor.

The distributor responded to the complaint and said its claims did not suggest the consumer would lose weight, but that the consumer could lose weight by using the product. The ASA disagreed.

The complainant, Dr Harris Steinman, of Cape Town, said many of these weight-loss products were scams because they were unregulated.

Often, little research had been done into the natural products’ relationship to weight loss, or the distributors inflated these effects in their claims, said Steinman.

“There are now approximately 155 000 unregulated and untested products on the market, of which probably 99 percent are scams,” he said.

Steinman added that most of these were “complementary medicines” that had not gone through the same testing and scrutiny as food products and orthodox medicines.

The ASA ruled that the website remove the offending claims and the title of doctor from the testimonial within two weeks.