Herbalife Diet Plans Questioned : Three Medical Authorities Testify Before Senate Panel

WASHINGTON —  Three medical authorities Tuesday questioned the usefulness and safety of “very low-calorie” diet formulas produced by Los Angeles-based Herbalife International as a Senate subcommittee opened hearings into widely used weight-reduction products.

Drs. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, a New York weight specialist, and Varro L. Tyler, a Purdue University authority on herbs, testified that Herbalife, which projects $1 billion in sales this year, misrepresents the medical worth of powders and pills that can cause nausea, diarrhea and constipation in some persons--as well as more severe health problems.

Moreover, there is “no evidence” that weight loss is induced by diet pills of the type marketed by Herbalife, Dr. Judith Stern, a professor of nutrition at UC Davis, told the senators. Instead, many users lose weight for a short time simply from the psychological or “placebo” effect of such pills, Stern and Tyler said.

After the hearing, Herbalife representatives challenged the medical testimony, claiming that their products, if used properly, are safe and have been proved effective by thousands of users and independent distributors.

Mark Reynolds Hughes, founder and president of the 5-year-old firm, has been subpoenaed to testify today.

Sen. William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.), chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs permanent investigations subcommittee, said that, after a five-month staff investigation, “I do not know if these products are inherently unsafe.”

But, said Roth, “there are enough questions being raised by the medical community, by former users and by the media to warrant a closer examination by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Roth said it is difficult to make firm judgments about “very low-calorie” diet formulas devised by firms such as Herbalife and Cambridge Plan International because the formulas have been subjected to few, if any, clinical tests. But products sold by mail-order houses that clearly are fraudulent, he said, include pills that “supposedly cause you to lose weight while you sleep” and plastic ear forms that purportedly suppress appetite by pressuring acupuncture points.

Pi-Sunyer, an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, said that crash diets unsupervised by a physician result in water loss--but that, correspondingly, “great amounts of sodium, potassium and chloride are lost, as well as lesser but substantial amounts of calcium.”

Heart problems can develop rapidly if those substances are not replaced, Pi-Sunyer told the subcommittee. He charged that Herbalife formulas alone would not prevent such an occurrence because many of the ingredients “are either dangerous, fraudulent or both.”

Tyler, meanwhile, testified that Herbalife’s principal product, a milkshake-type powder known as “Slim and Trim Formula No. 1,” is “falsely represented” as being able to curb a person’s appetite, “cleanse the system” and help burn excess calories. There is nothing in the protein powder to meet any of these claims, he said.

Other formulas advertised as containing nutritious herbs have them only in trace amounts too insignificant to nourish the body, Tyler said. However, the largest components are laxative-type herbs that cause diarrhea in sensitive consumers, he added.

Furthermore, a Herbalife formula called Herbal-Aloe contains a herb known as comfrey, which has been “shown to produce malignant tumors in the livers of rats when included in their diet,” Tyler testified.