Watch out for some PR about "Nuratrim" - wonder where the evidence is

This post is now five years old so many links don't work, but here's what will probably be being advertised in newspapers in the New Year (2018): https://moreniche.com/offers/

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Occasionally I take a look at the MoreNiche affiliate forum (see 'further reading' below) to see what new pills, potions or salves their members are flogging. Affiliates do this by setting up websites to promote a product and then linking these sites to a separate site that sells it. Each affiliate adds a piece of code to their promotional pages and if their site routes more customers to the selling site and secures a sale, then they receive a payment. Naturally people are trying ways of making their site more prominent so that people will find theirs and be routed through to the payment site.

Based on the evidence of last Christmas there seems to be a reasonably strong correlation between what's being discussed on the forums and what gets plugged in the Daily Mail post-Christmas relating to weight loss. The MoreNiche people don't deal just in weight loss pills, teas or patches though they also have stuff to flog for people with acne or erectile problems. 

Something called Nuratrim has apparently joined the MoreNiche family and we're to expect some post-festive PR for it.

The affiliates have already registered some websites which will be used to promote it - I've tried to avoid giving them any Google juice by deliberately not making these active links.

buynu//ratrim.net

nur//atrimreviews.com

nuratrimre//view.net 

nuratrimre//view.org and others a bit like this

and the main website for the product is here w//ww.nur//atrim.co//m /

It seems to be a herbal supplement containing the usual suspects and there are some claims made on the "Why Nuratrim works" page that I think are quite amusing. For one it says that the product "contains a blend of leading edge scientifically proven weight loss ingredients" - oh no it doesn't. These ingredients have cropped up in plenty of other products so I think that's just flannel. 

I'm really not sure about this "scientifically proven" bit - typically with these products a list of ingredients, and the evidence for them as individual ingredients, is given, rather than the evidence for the product. I don't know if anyone has done any testing on Nuratrim (a combination of four ingredients: glucomannan, licorice extract, green tea and capsicum extract) as a product rather than reporting information about the evidence for items individually. 

"Blatantly banking on customers not understanding that it's like a
Hollywood studio advertising that their new movie was 'watched by
Roger Ebert'" 

Interestingly the information given for capsicum refers to 'capsiplex' which is also another MoreNiche product.

Anyway, no evidence is given for Nuratrim, only for individual ingredients and none of that seems unusually impressive - certainly not enough to pin the sale of a product to, it all looks more like pilot studies.

No evidence at all offered for glucomannan, just information about what it is. Licorice extract is backed up with an 8 week study in 84 people - I'm not saying it's a bad study, more "steady on there, let's not sell products based on small short studies". There's actually a full reference given for the green coffee one (which looks interesting) so that might be worth looking at and finally I think there's enough information in the paragraphs on capsicum / capsiplex to find the study to which they refer, but again it seems like it might be a small study.

Last year the Mail was advertising products from Roduve (slimweight patch and Tava tea) but it looks like there were a lot of dissatisfied affiliates who didn't get payments in good time...

By the way, anyone can set up a website about this product ;-)

https://sites.google.com/site/nuratrimweightloss/

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Here's how the story has unfolded... this is a kind of bloggytracker (idea pinched from The Guardian's Storytracker)

26 December 2011: because of the publication (well, less 'publication', more 'blurting') of a press release about this product in a newspaper today I wrote a brief follow-up post appealing to anyone writing about diet pills and patches to check the name of the product against the MoreNiche affiliate site. I think it's a safe bet that if it features there then the evidence might still be *cough* being gathered...

28 December 2011: yesterday (27 December 2011) I saw that the Daily Mail had written about the story and also checked the whois information for nuratrim.com and didn't find much (because I think they've made it private, which is fair enough) but did spot that Newstel Media Ltd had a mention there and from that company's own website it's conceivable that they are behind the PR and / or providing the telephone answering service for people to ring in to buy the product.

According to the cached version of the 'terms and conditions' the page used to say "We accept Credit Card, Debit Card payments via our secure on-line payment processing system, provided by Sage Pay and supported by Newstel Media Ltd." and now says "We accept Credit Card, Debit Card payments via our secure on-line payment processing system, provided by Sage Pay and supported by Advanced Health Ltd.". Advanced Health Ltd also have an Amazon store where they offer quite a range of products including Meratol, Capsiplex and things to grow eyelashes (!)

I added this story to the PRlapses blog (News that isn't).
Today (28 Dec) I spotted that the MoreNiche forum posse have clocked my blog posts (and page three) about their activity and have now made some posts on the forum private, including the ones I mentioned here. I've linked to the cached version of the forum post and of course I have a permanent copy (the cache will eventually disappear). A couple of the affiliates are also selling on their Nuratrim sites.

29 December 2011 
I re-read the Daily Mail article (Google suggests it was updated within the last 23 hours) and saw this line that I'd missed before, or it had been added. Quite cheering really "However, requests for the clinical evidence from the company has yet to be returned."  The Daily Mail doesn't seem to be that amenable to checking the cached pages so it may have been there all along and I just missed it, or they've added it in. I also hadn't seen the name of the company - Nuropharm Ltd which is behind the product, that info is available at Nuratrim's site but I hadn't noticed it.

30 December 2011
I caught wind of a new product - Capsiplex Plus - which is going to be advertised in the Daily Express (or probably the Sunday Express) on New Year's Day. Yet again evidence is offered for the individual ingredients yet the tiny pilot studies of the combined / complete product are mentioned but I failed to spot any publication details for these. 

31 December 2011
There's a member on the MoreNiche forum who seems to be of a skeptical mindset (no it's not me in disguise, honest!) and who has published several posts expressing concern about some of the marketing for Nuratrim (in particular the claims that it had been previously launched in the US). Today I spotted that he or she was concerned about fake nutritionists and doctors being used to lend credibility on websites, but according to the others commenting on his / her post they're real. No reason why they shouldn't be of course.

Results of a Google search for the text in bold

7 December 2012
After indirectly getting in touch with The Telegraph to ask them to sort out their unwitting advert for Nuratrim they've now removed it (although at the time of writing the URL still indicates what might have been there http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wirecopy/8977974/Weight-loss-pill-which-burns-calories-of-40-minute-jog-goes-on-sale.html). This isn't much of a victory in retrospect as the mere fact that it was published at all is what allows MoreNiche affiliates to write stuff like "The Telegraph is a reputable and popular media source and now it has published a full-fledged article on Nuratrim."

This was not a 'full-fledged' article by any stretch, it was 'wire copy' which is a press release sent by the company or its PR agency, ie written by someone who wants to sell a product in the hope that a newspaper will write about it. The MoreNiche affiliate's website implies a degree of journalistic appraisal rather than straightforward churnalism - hopefully all this sort of nonsense will be magically sorted out by the Leveson inquiry, one can hope ;)   

You can easily tell if an "independent review site" really is by clicking on the 'buy' link which will undoubtedly be there. You'll have to keep your wits about you and also have View / Taskbar enabled but, if you don't blink, once you've clicked 'buy' and the company's page loads you should see the tell-tale sign of track.moreniche.com appearing in the taskbar, see pic below.

The taskbar usually appears in the left hand side of the window... sometimes on the right hand side ;)

16 January 2012
From the King's Fund weekly email alert on health policy...

Food supplements: guidance and FAQs
The responsibility for legislation on food supplements in England transferred from the Food Standards Agency to the Department Health on 1 October 2010.  Guidance and summary documents have been updated to reflect this change and update references.

• Updated summary information
• Updated guidance
• Department of Health - publications

19 January 2012
On further investigation it appears that Nuropharm formulate the pills and print labels for them "Nuropharm can handle basic design and vitamin label printing as well as more complicated requests" and may well distribute them as well. A commenter below has highlighted that Amazon has stopped selling Nuratrim - presumably that makes it a bit easier for the affiliates to do so instead.

3 June 2012
http://www.prlog.org/11854449-ex-hollyoaks-actress-has-revealed-that-she-uses-nuratrim-to-stay-in-shape.html - my favourite line is "The product has been mentioned in so many popular publications like The Daily Mail and The Telegraph" although it was actually removed, fairly promptly, from the Telegraph after another blogger (no, not me) got in touch with them about it.

22 August 2012
I have just noticed that Nuropharm Ltd (trading as http://www.nuratrim.com the parent company of Nuratrim), has been added to the Advertising Standards Authority's list of 'non-compliant  online advertisers'.

"[The compliance team] has contacted Nuropharm Ltd several times about removing claims that Nutratrim is scientifically proven to assist weight loss, burn fat, reduce cholesterol, increase metabolism and reduce appetite." More details here.

Although this particular post gets most of its hits from people Googling for Nuratrim (along with other relevant keywords) this blog post has actually only received around 2,500 hits in total which is a bit pathetic really. I doubt Nuropharm's citation on the ASA's website will stop people sending money to buy a product for which there doesn't appear to be any good evidence though. As always, they win ;)

For independent reviews of the product I recommend having a look at its page on Amazon.

26 August 2012
Despite the 'advertorial' in The Telegraph for this product* was online for less than a week it seems to have done its work. I've had a look in the Amazon reviews (vastly negative) for the product and spotted a few references to the product being advertised in both the Tele and the Daily Mail. I've also found several copies of the Telegraph article (made available by MoreNiche as a banner) in use on a number of affiliates pages, for example this one.

* it was nothing more than a copy/pasted press release and the 'author' of the story was given as 'wire copy' which I believe means it wasn't written by anyone on the paper

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Further reading

Do slimweight patches work? How? (2 January 2011)

I discovered the MoreNiche forum at the end of December 2010 and wrote about a particular product that had been promoted in the Daily Mail. There's also a lot of information in there on how they use various forms of search engine optimisation (SEO) to flood Google with pages that lead anyone looking for these products to affiliate sites first of all. It's here that I learned about article spinning sites - Google doesn't tend to index identical content so by changing a few words here and there you can turn one article into tens, hundreds and increase your indexing and page rankings (all the pages link back to each other).

Seeding articles of woo with sensible information - an experiment (18 June 2011)

I noticed that a photograph I'd taken of an advert in Holland & Barrett for a tea had been picked up and used in sites that were trying to sell it. I also noticed that the comments I'd left below the photo on my own Flickr page were also picked up. This gave me the idea that if I created free images and added comments to them then these might be picked up as well - in this way I hoped to Trojan horse my way into scam sites by linking to something sensible and pointing out that there's no evidence for the product. It's been only mildly successful (in terms of stuff getting picked up) but I've honestly no idea if anyone's decided against buying something because they've seen one of my images and comments).