TO: www.drday.com <file://www.drday.com>
FROM: Federal Trade Commission
RE: Health Claims on Your Website for Cancer Cures and Treatment Products
DATE: August 28, 2007
Deceptive Advertising Claims are Illegal
The staff of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently reviewed your website. We are sending you this letter to remind you of your obligations under the law. The FTC protects consumers from unfair or deceptive advertising or marketing practices that raise health or safety concerns.
The FTC Act prohibits deceptive advertising in any medium, including the Internet. Under the FTC Act, advertising claims for products and services must be truthful and not misleading. Health-related claims, like those made about cancer on your website, must be supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence – the kind of evidence scientists who are experts in the field would rely on. It is against the law to make health claims without scientific support, to exaggerate the benefits of products or services, or to misstate the level of scientific support you have for your claims. Please note that consumer testimonials are not proof that your product works. If you make a health claim through a consumer testimonial, you must have competent and reliable scientific evidence that your product will have the same benefit for other users.
If your website makes express claims (literally made in the ad) or claims by implication (made indirectly or by inference) about the benefits of any cancer-related products or services that are not substantiated by competent and reliable scientific evidence, or are otherwise deceptive or fraudulent, you must stop making those claims immediately. http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2001/06/cureall.htmhttp://www.ftc.gov/opa/2001/07/chrisenter.htmhttp://www.ftc.gov.opa/2001/07/chrisenter.htmhttp://www.ftc.gov/opa/2001/07/westbot.htmIf <http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2001/06/cureall.htmhttp://www.ftc.gov/opa/2001/07/chrisenter.htmhttp://www.ftc.gov.opa/2001/07/chrisenter.htmhttp://www.ftc.gov/opa/2001/07/westbot.htmIf> your website contains any untruthful or unsubstantiated claims, you could face law enforcement action. That could mean:
1. A federal court injunction. Violations of court orders could result in civil penalties or criminal prosecution.
2. An order to pay consumer refunds.
3. Administrative orders with fines up to $11,000 per violation.
Action Requested
We urge you to review all cancer-related claims on your website. If you don’t have competent and reliable scientific evidence to support the claims, please change them immediately or remove them altogether.
FTC investigators have saved your website and will be revisiting it soon. Within 10 business days, please send an email to cancer@ftc.gov <mailto:cureall@ftc.gov> describing the actions you’ve taken or plan to take to address these concerns.
To ensure that your website complies with the FTC Act, we suggest reviewing the following guidance from the FTC:
1. Dietary Supplements: An Advertising Guide for Industry www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/dietsupp.htm <http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/dietsupp.htm> http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/dietsupp.htm/ <http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/dietsupp.htm/>
2. Frequently Asked Advertising Questions: A Guide for Small Business www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ad-faqs.htm <http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ad-faqs.htm>
3. Advertising and Marketing on the Internet: The Rules of the Road at www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ruleroad.htm <http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ruleroad.htm>
Please remember that you are responsible for complying with laws enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in addition to laws enforced by the FTC. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) defines a drug, in part, as an article intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of a disease, or to affect the structure or any function of the body.1 Drugs that are not generally recognized by qualified, scientific experts as safe and effective for the uses recommended or suggested in their labeling are considered to be new drugs.2 It is illegal to market a new drug in the U.S. without obtaining prior FDA approval.3 Violations of the FDCA may result in seizure of illegal products and an injunction against the manufacturers and distributors. We have contacted the FDA about claims on your website. Remember, too, that unfair or deceptive acts or practices also are illegal under many state laws. The standards under those laws may be different from the FTC Act.
If you are not located in the United States, we have referred the claims on your website to the consumer protection enforcement agency that has jurisdiction in your locale.
We look forward to hearing from you.
1 21 U.S.C. § 321(g).
2 21 U.S.C. § 321(p).
3 21 U.S.C. §§ 355 and 331(d).
2. Dr. Lorraine Day's response to the FTC
To: Federal Trade CommissionFrom: Lorraine Day, M.D. www.drday.com (askdrday@earthlink.net)
Re: Your e-mail to me of August 28, 2007
Date: September 10, 2007
I am responding to your e-mail of August 28, 2007.
In the “Re: line of your letter to me you refer to “Health Claims on Your Website for Cancer Cures and Treatments Products.” This is completely inaccurate and a perversion of the truth. I make NO claims, nor do I even imply, that the whole foods sold on my website “Cure Cancer” and I am incensed that you would suggest such a thing.
It is absolutely TRUE that the better one eats and lives – the healthier he will be and the less disease he will have. That is not only well documented in the medical literature, it is common sense - something that is woefully lacking in the medical/industrial/governmental complex today.
Your e-mail is obviously a form letter, unsigned, faceless and nameless, without even the courtesy or courage of a human signature. And your e-mail contained no indication of what, on my website, you perceive as a problem. You’re really suggesting that it is up to me to figure out what you are thinking.
However, near the end of your letter you make passing mention of the FDA so I am assuming that you are the “Hit Squad” Enforcers for the FDA - against anyone who has the audacity to tell truth - against anyone who has the audacity to promote GOOD FOOD (and the other things that promote a healthy, disease-free body, including exercise, fresh air, pure water, sunlight, restful sleep, handling stress, etc.) rather than Dangerous DRUGS to “maintain health.”
I have just become aware that the FDA has extended it’s “long arm of the law” to include the advertising of healthy FOOD in its jurisdiction, apparently in an attempt to make sure NO American will be allowed to know that “Good Food is Good For You.”
George Orwell’s “1984” Newspeak has truly arrived!
The FDA has agreed that Pharmaceutical companies, the real masters of the FDA, can spend billions of dollars advertising the Lie that “DRUGS will prevent disease,” but the FDA, with the complicity of the FTC, has now made it illegal to say that healthy food will help prevent disease.
Truth has become illegal!
What a sad day for America. We are rapidly tumbling back into the Dark Ages!
When a governmental agency restricts the public’s access to information about the ability of healthy eating to help prevent disease, that agency is PROMOTING disease with all its misery – and, of course, the “need” for MORE DRUGS – which apparently is exactly what the government and the Pharmaceutical companies want.
Drugs DO NOT prevent – OR cure - disease, no matter how much the FDA deludes itself into thinking so. Drugs CAUSE disease! Just look at the overwhelming evidence of the thousands of harmful, disease-producing, side effects of the drugs listed in the PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference). That’s why the doctors must add drug after drug to a patient’s regimen - to cover up the side effects caused by the previous drugs already prescribed. And that’s what the Pharmaceutical companies love – more drugs – and more obscene profits.
With adverse reactions from Doctor-prescribed Pharmaceutical Drugs being the FOURTH LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH in America, and with the eating habits of Americans being some of the worst in the world, if the FDA were truly interested in “Consumer Protection” it would want to protect the health of the people by promoting the well-documented medical evidence linking a healthy diet with the Prevention AND Reversal of disease.
But instead, the FDA has chosen to suppress this information on health and life and instead chooses to promote Drugs, Disease, and Death.
What is the result of this drug orgy? MORE disease! The FDA was originally set up to police and control these Pharmaceutical companies, but instead, the FDA has become putty in their hands and the Pharmaceutical companies now control the FDA. How shameful that is.
Drugs, such as those for high blood pressure, diabetes, supposed autoimmune diseases, Parkinson’s, ALS, and virtually all other drugs, never cure ANY disease, they only cover up the symptoms of the disease while the disease itself continues to progress. That is why we doctors are taught in our medical training to tell patients that they will have to be on the drugs for the rest of their life – precisely BECAUSE drugs DON’T cure the disease. Yet the FDA condones the promotion of DRUGS, with their numerous and often life-threatening side effects.
According to the FDA, promoting harmful DRUGS to prevent and treat disease is commendable, but promoting a healthy diet and lifestyle for the same purpose is illegal! That’s a dictum straight from hell!
If healthy food helps “maintain” health, the only way it can do that is by preventing disease!
Health – by definition – means freedom from disease! Check it out in Webster’s New World Dictionary. So if food maintains health, it MUST – by definition - prevent disease! But the FDA has now made this kind of rational thinking illegal.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the only place the body has to get the raw materials to make new cells is by what a person puts in his mouth. If one puts highly nutritious, natural, wholesome food in his mouth, drinks plenty of pure water, and lives a healthy lifestyle, the body can make healthy cells and the function of the immune system is improved so it (the immune system) can do its job to maintain health – and by definition - prevent disease, a truth that the FDA wants to deny and destroy.
But if a person eats junk food, processed food, and a diet full of animal products with little or no fruits, grains, and vegetables, and doesn’t follow a healthy lifestyle, EVERYONE in medicine knows that person WILL get sick, sooner or later. Why is the FDA trying to bury that truth? Why is the FDA attempting to impose Talmudic control over every detail of everyone’s life?
The answer is simple – it is to satisfy the voracious greed of the Pharmaceutical companies who control them – it is NOT to protect the health of the public.
If eating a rotten diet of junk food and processed food that is low in nutrients helps cause disease, a fact that EVERY doctor will admit, then WHY is it forbidden to say that eating a diet of healthy food will help prevent disease?
Has everyone gone mad? Can no one think rationally anymore? Do the Pharmaceutical companies control everyone?
There are no unfair or deceptive claims on my website. And just for the record, I do not now, nor have I ever, said – or even implied - that Beta Beet or any of the other foods advertised on my website cure cancer or any other disease. EVERYTHING on my website is the TRUTH and is supported by documentation from the finest peer-reviewed medical journals.
But the FDA has now made it ILLEGAL TO TELL THE TRUTH!
To satisfy the shameless perversity of the FDA, I am removing the portion of the sentence on the BetaBeet page on my website that refers to decreasing one’s risk of arteriosclerosis by lowering levels of the amino acid homocysteine by the nutrients that happen to be in beets – and many other wholesome foods. That truthful and well-documented statement has been on my website for several years. And it has not only been TRUTHFUL, but it has been LEGAL.
But now, with one fell swoop, the FDA has passed a law making that TRUTH illegal.
But that statement is still TRUE, even though the FDA demands, by their draconian, Unconstitutional Talmudic law, that I remove that truth.
The nutrients in Beets, indeed, DO lower homocysteine levels and thereby DO decrease the risk of arteriosclerosis (see the evidence below), as is documented by numerous medical journal articles, even though the FDA has now criminalized this truth.
The saddest part is that those at ALL levels in the FDA and FTC, and their annoying gadfly, Stephen Barrett, who participate in the ruthless crushing of truthful information on natural healing, will themselves, fall into such darkness that when they or their family become ill, they will not be able to understand how to get well and will have no where to turn but to the horribly painful, and totally useless, exploits of the drug or scalpel doctors who know nothing about true healing.
My only comment is that author Ayn Rand had it right. Here are a few of her quotes:
“The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
“A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”
“Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.”
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”
Included with this e-mail is the documentation from the finest medical journals (just click on the links below) for everything I have previously had on the BetaBeet section of my website, a phrase of which has now been removed because of its unconstitutional “criminalization” by the FDA.
When a government passes laws to suppress truth, the citizens, including those who help enforce those laws, become slaves!
Yours truly,
Lorraine Day, M.D.
3. The information previously posted on my website with the links to ALL the medical journal documentation for the claims I have made, showing that it is TRUE – even though the FDA has now declared this TRUTH to be ILLEGAL.
Attachments:In the links below, the following articles will be found:
- Accumulation and distribution of free folic acid content in red beet, by Wang M, and Goldman IL, Department of Horticulture, University of Wisconsin-Madison in PubMed (A service of the National Institutes of Health) PMID:9198109 (Indexed for MEDLINE)
- US Department of Agriculture: Nutrients in Beets (including Calcium and Iron)
- Betaine: Overview, Uses, and Dietary Sources, from the University of Maryland Medical Center
- What is Homocysteine? American Heart Association
- Review: High levels of homocysteine are associated with an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, by Eikelboom JW, Lonn E., Genest J Jr., et al., Homocysteine and cardiovascular disease: a critical review of the epidemiologic evidence, Ann Intern Med 1999 Sept 7; 131:363-75
- Dose-dependent effects of folic acid on plasma homocysteine in a randomized trial conducted among 723 individuals with coronary heart disease, European Heart Journal, Vol 23, Number 19, 2002.
- Betaine Supplementation Lowers Plasma Homocysteine in Healthy Men and Women, Steenge, GR, Verhoef, P Katan, MB, Human Nutrition and Metabolism, J. Nutrition 133:1291-1295, 2003
- Betaine and Betaine Hydrochloride, PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference),
Click on the links below and you will find ALL the documentation.
Original BetaBeet Information
BarleyGreen®BetaBeet™
BetaBeet™ is a soluble powder made from the juice of organically-grown beets and contains a variety of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients including folic acid, iron, calcium and betaine. These facts have been established the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the University of Maryland Medical Center, respectively.
Like BarleyGreen, BetaBeet™ is produced from seed to finished product using organic cultivation, gentle juicing, and award-winning, low-temperature spray-drying process. Their special processing stabilizes the nutrients in the beet juice, providing you with live enzymes and whole food nutrition which is certified organic. The result is a delicious and nutrient-dense beet juice powder that provides you with the nutrients and detoxification power of fresh beets.
BenefitsBeets help to detoxify the liver and blood while providing important support nutrients to the body. In addition, beets may protect the cardiovascular system, enhance fat metabolism and increase muscle mass.
Detoxification: The liver performs many functions including the use, storage, and deactivation of dietary-derived substances. BetaBeet provides nutrients critical to liver function and aids in the breakdown of toxins before they accumulate, thereby, helping to protect the liver. The vitamins and other nutrients contained in beets are intimately involved with proper fat absorption, transportation, and metabolism.
Cardiovascular Support: Betaine also plays an important role in the health of the cardiovascular system. Like vitamin B6 and folic acid, betaine helps reduce high blood levels of the amino acid homocysteine, which can be a risk factor for arteriosclerosis.
These facts have been established by the American Heart Association, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the European Heart Journal, The Journal of Nutrition, Emory University HealthCare, and the PDR (Physicians Desk Reference).
Fat Metabolism and Protein Deposition: Another important benefit from consuming beets is it’s potential for promoting fat metabolism and protein deposition leading to a leaner, healthier body. It is a cost-effective way of getting valuable nutrition. BetaBeet is suitable for both adults and children and the taste and color will appeal to everyone. BetaBeet’s nutrients are quickly absorbed by your body. It tastes great by itself or mixed with BarleyGreen and BetaCarrot.
Ingredients: Juice from organic beets and organic maltodextrin (a complex carbohydrate).
Below is the BetaBeet information that was changed to accommodate the draconian laws of the FDA:
BarleyGreen®BetaBeet™
BetaBeet™ is a soluble powder made form the juice of organically-grown beets and contains a variety of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients including folic acid, iron, calcium and betaine. Like BarleyGreen, BetaBeet™ is produced from seed to finished product using organic cultivation, gentle juicing, and award-winning, low-temperature spray-drying process. Their special processing stabilizes the nutrients in the beet juice, providing you with live enzymes and whole food nutrition which is certified organic. The result is a delicious and nutrient-dense beet juice powder that provides you with the nutrients and detoxification power of fresh beets.
Benefits
Beets help to detoxify the liver and blood while providing important support nutrients to the body. In addition, beets may protect the cardiovascular system, enhance fat metabolism and increase muscle mass.
Detoxification: The liver performs many functions including the use, storage, and deactivation of dietary-derived substances. BetaBeet provides nutrients critical to liver function and aids in the breakdown of toxins before they accumulate, thereby, helping to protect the liver. The vitamins and other nutrients contained in beets are intimately involved with proper fat absorption, transportation, and metabolism.
Cardiovascular Support: Betaine, Vitamin B6, and folic acid all play an important role in maintaining the health of the cardiovascular system.
Fat Metabolism and Protein Deposition: Another important benefit from consuming beets is it’s potential for promoting fat metabolism and protein deposition leading to a leaner, healthier body. It is a cost-effective way of getting valuable nutrition. BetaBeet is suitable for both adults and children and the taste and color will appeal to everyone. BetaBeet’s nutrients are quickly absorbed by your body. It tastes great by itself or mixed with BarleyGreen and BetaCarrot.
Ingredients: Juice from organic beets and organic maltodextrin (a complex carbohydrate).
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