Doctor Reviews Herbalife: Is It a Scam?
Herbalife has a pretty big scary legal team. So this video is for entertainment purposes only – I don’t know what I’m talking about, everything I say is fabrication, and in fact, I’m completely insane.
But seriously: it kind of feels redundant to make this video at this point because if you’ve heard of Herbalife, you probably have a strong opinion one way or another. I went to their event to look at it from a nutritional standpoint and to understand their claims and experience. I also think you can make progress doing any diet and training program, taking any supplement, but I’m here to say that you’ll be able to make better progress without it.
I’m going to cover:
- Their nutritional principles
- My experience at their event
- What multi-level marketing schemes are
- Product and nutritional information
- The taste
- The alleged contaminants
Nutritional Principles: The Good and the Problematic
Herbalife’s stated nutritional principles are:
- Healthy breakfast
- Small frequent meals
- Nutritious snacks
- Regular hydration
- Essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals
The last three I can agree with: hydration, nutrients, vitamins. It’s pretty hard to say those are bad things. But the first two need scrutiny.
Breakfast and Metabolism
The idea of healthy breakfast and kickstarting the metabolism has been put to bed multiple times in research. As with a lot of nutritional myths, it was given a big boost by industry to get that belief going, and it’s turned into something that’s become part of common parlance. Herbalife are just piggybacking off that marketing campaign.
Small Frequent Meals
The data on satiety and hunger shows that the sweet spot is around three meals a day. If you go six or eight meals a day, the problem becomes clear with numbers: let’s say you’ve got 2,000 calories. To split that into eight meals, that’s about 220-240 calories per meal. It’s barely anything, and you’re not going to be satisfied from it. So that’s going to cause you to be more likely to overeat because you’re always just teasing yourself with a little bit of food.
Tip it the other way, and you have one 2,000 calorie meal in the morning – you’ve then got quite a long period between meals where you’re not eating anything. Both extremes are going to make you quite hungry. Generally people tend to eat the fewest calories at around three meals.
You might find it’s four or two, but three is kind of the base camp.
So in line with that, the thing about nutritious snacks is just more food. At the end of the day, most Herbalife customers are not looking for weight gain. They’re looking for some kind of magic bullet weight loss method. Adding in more calories doesn’t make sense both intuitively and by what the data says about satiety.
The Herbalife Event Experience
I went to their event a few years ago after being encouraged to by one of the resellers. I honestly went in with a totally open mind. Unfortunately, when I got there, I just wanted to be sick the entire time. And for Herbalife’s legal team, that was because of totally unrelated acute paroxysms of nausea and nothing to do with the product. They managed to really effectively press every one of my nutritional buttons, and I can just summarize it as confidently wrong. In fact, the stuff that was being said wasn’t even as slick as the official facing careful use of undefinable terms – it was just total shooting from the hip.
The more you learn about something, the less you feel like you know about it, but your filter becomes extremely sensitive. It’s the same as seeing a news article about something you have specialist knowledge in and thinking, “This is total rubbish. What kind of journalism is this?” Then the penny drops and you’re like, “Oh my god, all news articles about topics outside my area of expertise are probably just as badly reported.” So that was my experience.
It didn’t fill me with confidence about the veracity of the claims or about the quality of the product.
Understanding Multi-Level Marketing
What is a multi-level marketing scheme? Well, it’s not a pyramid scheme. It just looks, behaves, and acts like a pyramid scheme, which is illegal – but it’s not one. It’s basically a commission-only workforce where the guy at the top is recruiting people to sell the product to people who sell the product, to people who sell the product, to people who buy the product.
According to a report of 350 multi-level marketing schemes, 99% of participants lost money. Now, I don’t actually have a problem with that in itself because retail traders, 95% of them lose money within 90 days. People who start new diets, people who start training programs – a lot of them fail. That’s nothing to do with the system; that’s just human nature. Selling is hard, so I’ve not got a problem with that in itself.
The Real Product
The product is not the supplements. The product is the business opportunity. You could argue the supplements are kind of the afterthought. As a business, they’ve absolutely smashed it. They’ve got great sales training, a target audience of nutritionally ignorant people who want to fix years of poor habits with a single supplement, first-mover advantage, and loads of cash to throw at this.
The product is the business opportunity.
The way the supplements are marketed is very careful use of the words “wellness” and “cellular nutrition” as opposed to nutrition that doesn’t involve cells. At the end of the day, it’s a business designed to make the people at the top of the business richer. But in terms of you making money as a multi-level marketing reseller, unless you’re very high up in the Herbalife corporate chain, I wouldn’t bother. There are far easier ways to make money online.
Product Analysis: Doses Matter
There are two core products: the Cell Activator and the Herbalife drink.
Cell Activator: Sub-Therapeutic Dosing
Here are the ingredients with what research shows about effective doses:
- ALA 150 mg – Standard dose is 300 to 600 mg
- Rhodiola rosea 10 mg – Lowest significant dose is 50 mg
- Resveratrol 0.9 mg – 5 to 10 mg is the lowest dose to have an effect
- Pine bark 2 mg – Minimum dose is 40 to 60 mg; usual doses are 100 to 120 mg
- Shiitake mushrooms 15 mg – Safe but insufficient data in humans for effectiveness; possibly 10 grams a day for immune effects
- Pomegranate rind extract 11 mg – Antioxidant effects start at 800 mg
There is a common practice in the supplement industry to put sub-therapeutic doses of things on the label so you can claim it contains this ingredient, banking on the fact that not many people will look at what the minimum effective dose needs to be. Bear that in mind next time you want to activate your cells.
The Herbalife Drink
Primarily it’s soy protein and fructose. Fructose is more likely to be stored as fat because of the limited pathways of its storage. The rest of the ingredients you can look at for yourself, but none of these I’m particularly excited about.
Taste
It was a few years ago when I tasted Herbalife supplements and protein bars, and food technology has come on a long way. So it may be that they taste a lot better now. At the time, I didn’t like it – very sweet, very artificial flavoring. But it may well have changed now.
Alleged Contaminants: The Legal History
The company was fined $200 million a few years ago and ordered to restructure its business and issue refunds to 350,000 distributors, all around an alleged liver toxicity scandal.
There have been over 50 reports of alleged liver toxicity attributed to Herbalife products allegedly containing bacterial DNA and psychoactive compounds. It’s a case report with circumstantial evidence only. I don’t think this necessarily means the company is evil or anything. They have a lot of charitable efforts. But bear that in mind.
This isn’t exclusive to Herbalife. With many supplements, they will contain contaminants, and it’s something to watch out for, particularly if you’re training in a drug-tested sport.
There would be nothing worse than failing a drugs test for a drug you didn’t even mean to take. At least if you’re going to take a drug, you want to have some performance-enhancing benefit from it rather than just accidentally ingesting it because it was in your protein shake.
The Bottom Line
It’s not a product for me. It’s not a product I would ever recommend to my clients. I think their business model is great if you happen to be at the very top of the chain in Herbalife. But it’s a no from me.
This is one of those polarizing fitness topics where people have already formed their opinion well before seeing any data, and anything they see subsequent to that just reinforces their pre-existing biases. So there’s my thoughts on it.
If you’re thinking you would like to know more about how to gain muscle and lose fat in the most efficient way possible, you are in luck by stumbling upon this channel. Head to propanefitness.com/start for a free program that covers everything you need to do: a beautiful infographic, full training program, progression model, apps to track it, and ways to eat flexibly without carrying everything around in Tupperware and living on broccoli and chicken breast.