Atkins Diet causes sales of SlimFast to plummet; the meal replacement product is made primarily with refined white sugar!

Wednesday, June 09, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: obesity, nutrition, diabetes

Unilever, the parent company of SlimFast, is seeing its profits plummet as a result of the success of the Atkins Diet. It's a good thing. I have long thought that the SlimFast line of products was a complete sham -- the #1 ingredient in many SlimFast powders is refined white sugar, and no nutritionist in their right mind would claim that consuming table sugar instead of a meal would help people lose weight. In my opinion, SlimFast has been fraudulently marketed to consumers with highly misleading labeling, and it should have been outlawed years ago. It takes a real distortion of reality to make a product out of sugar and water, label it "SlimFast" and imply that people will lose weight by drinking it.

Fortunately, consumers are wising up. (Good for you!) SlimFast sales are plummeting. Today, the only people I still see buying SlimFast are the obese, which is a pretty good indicator that the product doesn't work. People who know anything about health wouldn't touch the product.

This is all bad news for Unilever, which appears to be just another greedy corporation that would apparently sell anything to anyone if they could make a buck doing it. Now this is pure opinion, so you Unilever lawyers can go bark up a different tree, but I believe that SlimFast actually promotes both obesity and diabetes. Any product made primarily with table sugar would have the same effect. Nutritionally speaking, SlimFast isn't very different from drinking a Coke.

We can thank the Atkins Diet -- and all the low-carb diets like Sugarbusters and the South Beach Diet -- for educating the public on the importance of avoid refined sugars and processed food ingredients. Now, people are actually reading the ingredients labels. And their eyes are popping out of their sockets when they learn that SlimFast has sugar listed as its #1 ingredient! Bizarre, huh? So the accelerating market failure of SlimFast can only mean good news for the health of American consumers. The fewer people who buy and consume SlimFast, and the more who avoid refined carbohydrates, the fewer people will be diagnosed with diabetes and obesity.

Then again, that's all my opinion. I'm willing to bet that Unilever will have a different opinion. From their point of view, "SlimFast is good for you!" There's a great book entitled, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You! that might be worth reading if you want to know how corporations manage to turn the truth upside down in order to sell dangerous products to consumers.