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Skeptical Inquirer, The

By Park, Robert L

It's All about the Money Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About. By Kevin Trudeau. Alliance Publishing Group, Inc., 2005. ISBN 0-975-59951-8. 570 pp. Hardcover, $29.95.

Anyone who somehow missed Kevin Trudeau's alternative medicine infomercials (see p. 51 in this issue) can now read his book, Natural Cures "They" Dont Want You to Know About. The book reads like an infomercial, but allows the reader at least a chance to pause and think about Trudeau's simplistic answers to the complex questions of health.

Why do people get sick? "The number one reason people are sick," Trudeau explains, "is because of the amount of drugs they take." He says statistics show conclusively that the more prescription and nonprescription drugs a person takes, the sicker he or she is.

I haven't seen "the statistics," but I'm sure he must be right. People who are sick undoubtedly do take more medicine than people who are well. This sort of upside-down logic is rampant in his book, along with the warning, endlessly repeated, that "it's all about the money." Believe me, it is.

Why are Americans getting fatter? Trudeau reveals the inside story: "Scientists who work in secret laboratories are developing chemicals and combinations of chemicals that are added to our food and not put on the label." These "secret poisonous chemicals," he explains, are specifically designed:

1. To make people hungry, so they will buy more food.

2. To make people fatter, because fat people eat more.

3. To addict people to the product.

4. To cause disease, because the food industry is in cahoots with drug companies.

What evidence does Trudeau provide of this shocking conspiracy? Kevin Trudeau doesn't do "evidence." He prefers to describe himself as a "whistle blower." His information, he claims, comes from unnamed "insiders." Other information seems to come from thin air: "I was looking through history books about Nazi concentration camps in World War II," Trudeau writes, "and I noticed that the people behind the barbed wire were all skinny. There weren't any fat people there." Trudeau's conclusion? "Your genes don't make you fat ... everyone can lose weight." Sure, just check into a concentration camp.

"Animals in the wild never get sick," we are told. What nonsense! Naturalists encounter sick and dying animals every day. Influenza, for example, is a bird disease (heard of bird flu?). It ravages wild bird populations every year and only occasionally does a strain cross over to humans. Wild animals are riddled with parasites and infectious diseases.

"There are cultures around the world where the people have never had cancer, or heart disease, or acid reflux disease, or prostate problems, etc." Wrong. There are certainly populations where these conditions are less common, but you may not want to live there. These are the diseases of old age. They are most common in the developed nations, where people have life expectancies about double that of the rest of the world.

The statements Trudeau makes are so preposterous that you might be tempted to dismiss anyone who would pay $29.95 for his book as hopelessly gullible. Unfortunately, they are more likely to be merely hopeless. Chronic pain and terminal illness have a way of making people willing to try just about anything. And the most widespread terminal condition is old age.

So who is this man, preying on the most vulnerable among us? Kevin Trudeau is a forty-two-year-old ex-convict with no formal education, who possesses a truly awesome natural talent for infomercial marketing. He is a classic snake-oil salesman. Sometimes referred to as "the Infomercial King," Trudeau prefers to describe himself as "the nations foremost consumer advocate."

The Federal Trade Commission sees him a little differently, fining him millions of dollars for false and misleading advertising and barring him from any further participation in infomercial marketing. However, to avoid infringing on his protected free speech rights, the FTC allowed an exception for "truthful infomercials for informational publications." Trudeau, thumbing his nose at the FTC, now does infomercials marketing his book. According to the book cover, over 1.5 million copies of Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About have been sold. This seems to be the only book offered by the Alliance Publishing Group, Inc. Who owns Alliance Publishing? Kevin Trudeau.

Trudeau's legal problems are nothing new. In 1990, he posed as a doctor in order to deposit $80,000 in false checks, and a year later pled guilty to credit card fraud in exchange for a two-year prison term. His prison time, he says, made him realize that "the love of money is the root of all evil." Americans love a reformed sinner, but has he really reformed? In 1998 he was required by the FTC to pay $500,000 to cover consumer redress relating to false or misleading claims made in six infomercials, and in 2004, he was fined $2 million and ordered to stop doing infomercials.

Trudeau makes no attempt to hide his troubles with the FTC; in fact, he wears his convictions as a badge of honor, proof that the establishment is out to silence him. The Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, congress, the drug companies, the food industry, the medical profession, and the scientific community, he says, are all part of a vast establishment conspiracy that makes people sick so they will buy dangerous drugs that will make them sicker still.

What should make us all wince are the tiny threads of truth woven into the fabric of this sleazy book: unhealthy ties of NIH scientists to the drug companies, regulatory agencies that seem more concerned with the health of the industries they regulate than with public health, lax enforcement of environmental regulations, tobacco companies that denied for years that their deadly product was harmful and yet are still in business. It's a standard tactic of scam artists to dwell on the sins of "the establishment," but Trudeau didn't have to make up the establishment sins.

Attorneys general of several states vigorously enforce state consumer protection laws, but the result is usually a consent- decree under which the snake oil merchants simply agree to cheat the citizens of other states. A huge and growing segment of the national population is victimized by alternative medicine scams that the FDA and FTC seem incapable of dealing with.

Ultimately, the only group in a position to challenge alternative medicine is the scientific medicine community. The job is left almost entirely to a handful of dedicated scientists and physicians who are well past retirement. You cannot build a reputation as a medical scientist by attacking an uneducated convicted felon with no medical credentials like Kevin Trudeau. Natural Cures is anti- establishment, anti-intellectual, and anti-health.

Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland and the author of Voodoo Science.

Copyright The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (SCICOP) Jan/Feb 2006