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  Turns out the real magic of the goji berry has less to do with our hearts or our circulatory systems or our blood glucose and more to do with our brains.

  As I wrote about in my last book, Buyology, our brains are prone to forming mental shortcuts, or bookmarks, known as somatic markers, that link cues from our physical world to specific emotional states or properties. Well, I’ve seen over and over in my work that shrewd companies are able to actually plant these somatic markers in our minds by creating associations between some positive emotion and their product. It seems that’s exactly what’s going on when it comes to the goji berry. Now, bear with me for a minute. The goji berry is found in China and Malaysia but is most often linked with the Himalayas, former home to the Dalai Lama. And when we think of that part of the world, what comes to mind? Could it be Buddhism and everything Buddhism symbolizes: purity, simplicity, compassion, wisdom, selflessness, and, ultimately, enlightenment? Marketers of these products know this, which is why they have very cleverly prodded our brains to associate their products with these spiritual properties. How? For one thing, by taking great care to emphasize the berry’s Far Eastern provenance in their packaging and advertising.

  Look, for example, at a bottle of FreeLife’s Dr. Earl Mindell’s Authentic Himalayan Goji Juice (available in Amazon’s health and beauty section, among other places). Its stylish, expensive-looking bottle pictures snow-dusted Mount Everest ascending majestically into the clouds, seemingly uncontaminated by humanity. In the foreground, like a small miracle, there dangles a cluster of bloodred goji berries, affixed to a gently bent, leafy stalk. The price of four one-liter bottles? $186.11. Or take Goji Gold 100% Pure Organic Juice, created by Dynamic Health Laboratories, which comes wrapped in similar packaging picturing distant, vaguely Himalayan mountains, seemingly reaching into the heavens and therefore unsullied by man. The company Steaz, maker of organic green teas and energy drinks, too, markets its products using images meant to imply a Far Eastern origin. If you go to its Web site, you’ll be greeted by yet another Himalayan scene—dark mountains covered with snow; clear, babbling brooks; untraveled pathways; a far-off red pagoda; and even computer-generated hummingbirds swooping in to feed on the nectar of virgin flowers—not to mention the words “Wisdom Can Be Obtained Within.”

  While these brands would have you believe that the contents of their bottles are grown, hand harvested, and shipped from the pristine mountaintops of Tibet or Nepal, that couldn’t be further from the truth; FreeLife products are mass-produced and bottled in a giant factory in Phoenix, Arizona, Dynamic Health Laboratories is based in Georgia, and Steaz’s operations are headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

  I’ve long considered the strongest brands on earth—from Apple to Harley-Davidson—to be intriguingly akin to the world’s religions, in that they tend to inspire in us a strong, ritualistic, almost evangelistic faith. In this chapter, though, we’ll be talking about a different way faith works as a hidden persuader. We’ll be talking about how marketers, advertisers, and purveyors of everything from food and beverages to clothing to cosmetics and more have embarked on an almost religious—and highly profitable—quest of their own: to ignite desire for their brands and products by imbuing them with such intangible yet emotionally powerful “spiritual” qualities such as health, hope, happiness, faith, clarity, good luck, and even the betterment of the human soul.

  Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and author of the best-selling book Predictably Irrational, notes that what we buy is often not only some thing but also an idea embodied by that thing.7 Whether that embodied idea is health, happiness, enlightenment, or social responsibility, it’s this very universal psychological tendency that makes the hidden persuaders we’ll read about throughout this chapter so incredibly powerful.

  It Was a Berry Good Year

  As anyone who has visited a health-food store in the past few years is well aware, goji isn’t the only “miracle” berry in town.

  Take acai, the fastest-growing product in the herbal subcategory, with 2009 sales just under $300 million dollars (it’s the biggest-selling botanical product today).8 The acai berry is a miniature, grapelike fruit that grows profusely in the rain forest of Brazil and is available today in the form of various tablets, juices, smoothies, yogurts, and instant drink powders (there’s even a goji-acai drink I saw once in a health-food store, which is like the marketing version of a double-bill concert featuring the Rolling Stones and U2). Again, the ads and the packages deliberately play up the berry’s “exotic” provenance; the box of Good Earth’s Rainforest Red Tea (with acai and tropical fruits, of course) pictures a savanna on which a mother lion sits nursing her cub, whereas Rainforest Therapy’s Acai Powder (fresh from the Brazilian Amazon) shows simple wooden vats overflowing with the life-giving fruit.

  At first glance this seems perfectly harmless; we can’t imagine we’d be so gullible as to be duped into thinking a berry has magical properties just because there’s a picture of a rain forest on the box. But that’s exactly the point. The reason these subtle, seemingly innocuous images are so insidiously persuasive is because they operate deep within our subconscious. What’s happening here, though we’re barely aware of it, is that when we read the words “rain forest,” or “Brazilian Amazon,” the somatic markers in our brains perk up and begin connecting various dots. Peacefulness. Serenity. Nature. Purity. And soon our brains begin to ascribe all sorts of spiritual and medicinal qualities to the product—which, of course, is exactly what the marketers want.

  If this sounds a bit far-fetched, remember that our brains are hardwired to connect these dots and to make associations that sometimes aren’t even there. Countless studies have shown that thanks to this pattern-recognition skill humans are born with, we often “see” connections that don’t exist. Remember the Today show experiment I described earlier? The one where I fooled crowds of New Yorkers into assuming that Krista, one of the show’s off-air producers, was a celebrity? It was because their brains had simply put together various dots: The dark glasses. The hair. The entourage. The paparazzi. The tiny dog. From these assorted cues, many concluded they’d not only seen Krista before but had attended her concerts, loved her music, and so on. In a sense, this is exactly what is going on with acai and all the other products marketers would have us believe possess miraculous, restorative, even spiritual properties. External cues trigger associations so powerful that the thought of questioning or second-guessing them doesn’t even occur to us.

  However, companies and retailers that sell acai products don’t stop there. Not by a long shot. They aren’t content just sitting back and hoping that we’ll associate good health and spiritual well-being with their products; instead, they come out and make all kinds of highfalutin, preposterously unsubstantiated claims that acai juice increases energy, helps you lose weight, improves digestion and sexual performance, detoxifies the body, relieves insomnia, reduces cholesterol, rejuvenates your complexion, and helps with heart disease and diabetes and more. Yet profoundly little evidence that acai berry juice improves human health actually exists. Like most berries, acai has good nutritional qualities, but “there is not a drop of research” that supports marketing claims that it prevents weight gain and facial wrinkles, says Jonny Bowden, a certified nutrition specialist and author of several health books.9 “The expensive Acai berry is the triumph of marketing over science, that’s the bottom line,” Bowden says. “[The berry] isn’t useless, but it’s not anything that people are claiming it is.”10

  I really have to tip my hat to whoever’s out there marketing acai and all these other “superfruits.” Sure, there are vitamins and omega-3s in the acai berry—just as there are in all the other (markedly less expensive) fruits, like bananas, grapes, and cranberries. And yes, one study by the University of Florida did suggest that an acai berry extract may indeed retard the growth of leukemia cells—in a petri dish, not in actual humans, that is.11 According to acai drink manufacturers, if you
drink four ounces of acai berry juice daily, it’s the equivalent of scarfing down more than two dozen fruits a day—well, that may be true (only because it’s highly concentrated), but according to the FDA we actually need only about two cups of fruit a day.

  As you may have surmised by now, acai juice isn’t cheap. A week’s supply will cost you roughly $40, which, if you do the math, comes to nearly $2,000 a year. And acai has even migrated over to the skin-care category; for approximately $40, we can now buy acai hydrating facial cream and antiwrinkle hydration cream infused with acai and mulateiro, rosewood, or copaiba (it would seem that the harder it is to pronounce, the more it costs).

  Some online sellers of acai berry go even further over the line in their sneaky efforts to sell us the stuff. Some use a tactic called network marketing, a clever technique that also incorporates a healthy dose of peer pressure. What this means is that one day your friendly neighbor Maureen will knock on the door, claiming that the acai juice she is holding (and by holding, I mean selling) has cured her of all that ailed her—from hangovers to varicose veins. A number have gone so far as to offer consumers a free trial, which seems fairly harmless—that is, until the trial ends and the consumer discovers that the company has covertly signed her up to automatically keep receiving shipments, to the tune of $80 a month; “some [have] had to cancel their credit cards just to break free from the scheme,” according to Arlene Weintraub in her book Selling the Fountain of Youth: How the Anti-Aging Industry Made a Disease Out of Getting Old—and Made Billions. The practice was so widespread, Weintraub writes, that “the consumers’ site Complaints Board (www.complaintsboard.com) collected more than 17,000 posts from furious buyers of Acai.”12 Sneakier still, according to CNN, many online acai vendors, like FWM Laboratories of Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood, Florida, Advanced Wellness Research of Miami Beach, Florida, and others stand accused of using fake diet blogs to steer consumers to sites plugging these free trials.

  While we’re on the topic of “magical” fruits, what about pomegranate? That one really does have actual health benefits, doesn’t it?

  Well, like the goji, the pomegranate has been used for centuries in traditional medicine across the world to treat everything from mouth ulcers to dry coughs to diarrhea to conjunctivitis to tuberculosis. (I might add that artwork from the earliest days of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity shows pomegranates symbolizing both unity and eternal life.) More recently, pomegranates have been shown to reduce UVB-induced skin damage13 and “exert favorable effects on lipid profiles” (whatever that means).14 What you have to keep in mind about these claims, though, is who is funding these studies: companies like POM Wonderful, maker of those wonderfully weird-shaped bottles of pomegranate juice. (Incidentally, in case you were wondering why those bottles are shaped that way, they were deliberately designed not only to resemble one pomegranate on top of another but also to evoke associations of the “ideal” female form—a little fuller on the top and bottom with a cinched waist. Similarly, the heart in place of the O in the brand logo is meant to evoke associations of cardiovascular health.) In any case, it turns out that if you fund enough scientific studies—and the owners of POM have not only funded over fifty-five of them, but they’ve also donated over $34 million in research support to scientists and universities all over the world—you can find something redeeming in just about any product under the sun. Sure, pomegranates have a handful of health benefits, but again, so do fruits, vegetables, fish, oatmeal, olive oil, a healthy lifestyle, exercise, and weight control.

  Did I forget to mention that pomegranate juice also contains “valuable antioxidants”? If you’re not sure exactly what antioxidants are or what they do—other than bellow at us from the shelves of the supermarket and health-food store—you aren’t alone. For the record, antioxidants neutralize and stamp out the errant, unstable molecules known as free radicals that damage our body’s cells (our bodies produce free radicals naturally, as do pollution, the environment, too much sunlight, and an unhealthy lifestyle). But just so you know, you don’t need to pay two dollars an ounce for some weird purple juice to stamp out these free radicals (nor do you have to travel to Nepal or the rain forest); antioxidants occur naturally in fresh fruits and vegetables. According to Dr. David Gems of University College London, “It is not the antioxidant content of your food that is critical, it is that you don’t eat too much [food]. . . . Get plenty of exercise. Get a dog and take it for a walk.”15

  But that doesn’t stop POM Wonderful from claiming (on its Web site) to be the “antioxidant superpower” and “far and away the top performer in terms of antioxidant potency, defined as the in-vitro ability to scavenge free radical molecules.” Nor does it stop the company from marketing a line of teas, bars, pills, and supplements containing the “super antioxidant extract” it calls POMx—the x, of course, meant to imply a medical prescription, despite the fact that the products have never been medically or clinically tested. So specious are the brand’s health claims, in fact, that in 2010, POM Wonderful received a warning letter from the FDA, stating that “the therapeutic claims on your website establish that the product is a drug because it is intended for use in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease”16 and that the marketing of POM Wonderful using these claims was in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.17 Similarly, in 2009, regulators accused Kellogg’s of deceiving consumers with claims that their Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved children’s cognitive health and attentiveness.

  While Kellogg’s quickly agreed to a settlement, POM, at time of writing, has repeatedly claimed innocence and, according to the company Web site, was “currently reviewing FDA concerns.”18

  What That Nutrition Label Is Really Saying

  It should come as no surprise that selling health (or the illusion of health) is hugely profitable. In fact, it is so profitable that it has spawned an entire exploding industry of products marketed as “functional foods”—one that pulled $37.3 billion in 2009 in the United States alone. Naturally, companies have a lot of tricks up their sleeves for snagging a share of this hugely profitable (and rather bogus) market; witness, for example, the cash cow known as “one-hundred-calorie packs,” which cleverly allow manufacturers to create smaller servings typically at twice the price. In industry parlance, this is a well-known strategy called selling “perceived health and wellness,” with the major word here being “perceived.”

  This illusion of “healthy” is perpetuated by the fact that many of us don’t know what many of the marketing buzzwords really mean; and of course marketers work hard to keep it that way. A national survey conducted by the Shelton Group found that, when asked whether we’d rather buy a product billed as “natural” or “organic,” we choose “natural,” “thinking organic is more of an unregulated marketing buzzword that means the product is more expensive,” says Suzanne Shelton, who conducted the survey. But she explains, “In reality, the opposite is true: ‘Natural’ is the unregulated word.” And other popular buzzwords—like “organically grown,” “pesticide free,” “all-natural,” and “no artificial ingredients”—actually mean very little.

  Given how freely companies throw these terms around, one can hardly blame us for being confused. For example, in a clever bit of bait-and-switch marketing, when Silk Soymilk recently introduced a line of milk made from nonorganic soybeans, it simply switched its organic soy milk to a green box and began selling the new, nonorganic version in the original red packaging, with only one perceptible change: replacing the word “organic” with the word “natural.”19

  Companies have gone to great lengths to convince us that “natural” equals “healthy,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Believe it or not, because the term is unregulated by the FDA, a company can dub just about any product “natural.” Potato chips made from actual potatoes instead of potato flakes may technically be natural, but they are still processed, high in fat, high in sodium, and lacking in nutritional value.

>   Or take English muffins. As someone who has been eating this breakfast staple for years, you can imagine how delighted I was to pull a package off the shelf and learn that they are now made with “unbleached enriched white flour” and contain “hearty grains.” How nutritious, I thought, feeling more virtuous than ever as I placed one in the toaster. But alas, this actually just means they are made with white flour and contain wheat—a standard ingredient for any bread or starch. As for “multigrain,” well, this more-grains-the-merrier approach sure sounds convincing, but all it means is that more than one type of grain is involved (which doesn’t automatically make it healthier). And what about products that boast they contain “isolated fibers”? Sorry, but this, too, is meaningless. To reap any actual health benefits, you have to consume “intact fibers,” such as oats or legumes. As the Washington Post points out, “Fiber One Oats & Chocolate bars say they provide 35 percent of daily fiber, but the fiber comes mainly from chicory root extract,”20 which isn’t one of the healthy fibers.

  With all this linguistic smoke and mirrors, is it any wonder we have no idea what it is we’re actually eating?

  My favorite sleight of hand is the claim that a food or drink can give you “energy.” Well, I have news for you. “Energy” is just another way of saying “calories.” Which makes this a very clever way of putting a positive spin on what would otherwise be the kiss of death for a “health” product—can you imagine a company touting the fact that its product is high in calories?

  What about those claims “made with real fruit” or “contains real fruit juice,” which regularly appear on the packages of fruit snacks, soft drinks, cereals, cookies, and pretty much any food item marketed to children (or, rather, the guilt-laden parents of children)? Again, considering that there is no law in place governing how much “real fruit” a food or drink must contain to make this claim, don’t be surprised if those strawberry-flavored fruit rolls contain maybe half a drop of fruit juice and are spiked with eight grams of sugar apiece (a perfect example of how food companies target children and their wallet carriers at the same time). And speaking of juice, what about those foods advertised as being fortified with nutrients, like calcium-fortified orange juice? According to the Washington Post, “fortifying a junk food does not offset the food’s negative qualities. Example: Fruit Loops says it ‘now provides fiber.’ But the 9 grams of sugar in each ¾-cup serving of the cereal could have far more negative effects than any benefit from the slim amount of added fiber.”21