Be Ad Aware
February 8th 2007 11:36
"I'm a bigger wonder than you are!"
What supplements work and what supplements do not work? Provide answers to this question and you are a genuine public servant. I cannot tell anyone what diet aids work and what diet aids are going to disappoint. I have used them because I was willing to take a chance that some of the claims were susbtantiable. I have been happy with the results sometimes and not so happy others. I have had the same experience with ergogenics and recovery aids. Furthermore,we might take the same supplement at the same time and get wildly different results. You are on your own in this area and, if you take something without a doctor's at least acquiesence, you are further on your own.
What I can do is implore you to consider how you react to advertising. We in the West all have been exposed to some much advertising that we can turn on the spam blocker whenever we want. But diet ads etc are more like a pop-up. They appear before our vision and we are drawn to them if we feel we are the least overweight or the tiniest bit guilty about what we have been eating and/or drinking. The same is true with the latest supplement. A serious weight trainer always wants to feel like his/her hard work are pay off to the maximum. There appears this product that claims to assure just that. Its hard not to want to give it a try.
I suggest that you become an ad analyst. That is, I think you would be well served to look at the wording of ads carefully. Start by removing all adjectives from the copy. The "new and amazing' diet aid is suddenly just a diet aid and there is a plethora of those, is there? Lets take out words like "discovery" or at least withhold our credence until we see if this is really something.
If some anecdote or testimonial is offered, lets remember that the worst scams always come with testimonials. The pictures of before and after can be explained with a different perspective when all the facts are known.(Read my post Midnight Confessions and you'll hear the story that will kill your confidence in before and after pictures.). The same goes for a spokesman.
If your supplement of choice still intrigues you, let Google ride to your rescue and find out what is being written about the substance in scientific journals. Amidst the jargon " this doesn't work" should be discernible there. If the news is that there may be a real reason to believe it works, then you are buying with your eyes open. I am even skeptical of experiments with people who take the whatever and exercise and then the results are reported as positive. I wonder if being in the study and being assigned to exercise, when such such exercise is probably relatively new to them doesn't stain the validity of the results.
Finally, make sure you're not reading an advertorial and not a strictly news item or report. Then line between the two gets blurrier every day. I don't think the public is as attuned to the phenomenon as they might wish to be. Just be careful out there. Your servant, as always.
"I'm a newer discovery than you!"
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