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Leptopril - Great News for the Fat and Gullible!
Written by Dave Nalle, Published August 06, 2005
Isn't the marketplace great! If you're at least 20 pounds overweight, thanks to the kind folks at Generix Laboratories, you can now get the same great weight loss formula as found in more expensive Leptoprin at a much more affordable price. Yes! Now you can not lose any weight at all and pay less at the same time. It's a medical miracle!
I have to give credit to the grifters at Klein-Becker (under the name A. G. Waterhouse) for coming up with a brilliant marketing idea for Leptoprin. The idea of selling a worthless diet pill at an insanely high price - currently $153 a bottle, down from $249 - in order to convince people that it's super powerful and must actually work, is pretty clever. It plays to the simplistic mentality of the diet pill buyer, that if he takes more pills or takes bigger and more expensive pills then he's sure to get results. Their TV ad is fantastic, with an overly intense and somewhat scary lady suggesting that you're just too poor and stupid not to be fat if you don't fork over hundreds of dollars for their product.
But wait, they're even more brilliant and more ballsy than anyone ever expected. As sales of Leptoprin start to fail, here comes Leptopril from Generix Laboratories with the same powerful formula as Leptoprin - and with a similar hard-sell ad - but at a generic price of only $29.95 a month. What a great deal. Thank God for generics so that we can all sit in our double-wides watching TV and yet still afford the amazing weightloss previously only available to the bloated wealthy pigs who could afford Leptoprin.
The TV ad for Leptopril - featuring the Leptoprin lady's slightly cuddlier amateur dominatrix sister - makes it sound like your friends at Generix have come to rescue you from the high prices of Leptoprin and are cutting into the market for this miracle drug and doing you a real favor by saving you money on their generic equivalent. The inevitable irony, of course, is that just like A. G. Waterhouse who make Leptoprin, Generix is one of the score of front companies for the same weasels at Klein-Becker. It's not a competing brand, it's the same pills in a different bottle with a (slightly) different name and a lower price. And in fact, they also sell the same pills under a third name, as Anorex, a name which they presumably though would help them cash in on the lucrative eating disorder market.
How can they afford to sell such a uniquely valuable product at such a low price just for you? Well, I'll tell you. It's because it doesn't work. Not a bit, not at all, not even in the vaguest possible way. Leptoprin/Leptopril is no more use for losing weight than sleeping with a mandrake root under your pillow is for improving your sexual stamina - probably less.
If you're 20 or more pounds overweight and serious about weightloss, you should go out and exercise and strictly limit your calorie intake. You should, under no circumstances waste hundreds of dollars on Leptoprin or Leptopril because they will do nothing at all to help you. These products are marketed as if they are medicine from a manufacturer with a name that sounds like a pharmaceutical company, but in reality they fall under the FDA's classification of 'herbal supplements', a vague category which includes any non-medical food product and which requires no testing or verification of ability to produce the results claimed. Basically, these are chalk pills - or more exactly chalk, salt and aspirin pills with a tiny amount of useless herbs in them. The only ingredients with any proven medical value are calcium and a low dosage of aspirin, so they might calm your stomach or help prevent heart disease if taken regularly, but they won't do anything to help you lose weight. They don't even have dangerous but sometimes effective stimulants like Ephedra in them.
Leptoprin and its clones are just the tip of the iceberg of the Klein-Becker bogus medicine catalog. Particularly reprehensible is their product PediaLean which is quite popular with parents of obese kids, despite the fact that it does no possible good for them, except to lighten their wallets so they have less money to spend on junk food. Of course, the amazing abilities of all of these products are supported by 'clinical studies'. In the real medical world that means multiple double-blind testing of the drugs and years of assessment. In the Klein Becker world that means asking some customers how they liked the product and then taking the few who report weightloss (likely coincidental) and paying them to provide testimonials for the product.
Not surprisingly, after a congressional investigation into these fake drugs, particularly Leptoprin and PediaLean, the Federal Trade Commission has filed charges against Klein-Becker, citing their bogus studies, unsubstantiated and unrealistic claims of weight loss, and the fact that the doctor who appears in their advertisements isn't actually a medical doctor. Despite these measures, it has proven difficult to shut down production of these bogus drugs, because the products are available under so many different names from so many dummy companies that as soon as one is shut down another pops up, so it's a constant uphill battle.
But for the consumer the solution is easy. Just don't buy any kind of diet pills that don't come from your doctor with a prescription. None of them work or if they do, the results are temporary and unpredictable and the side effects - possibly including death if it contains Ephedra - really aren't worth it. Thank me. I just saved you $153 or at least $29.95 if you wanted to not lose weight at the discount generic cost for Leptopril.
By the way, the internet is jammed with sleazy websites selling these bogus weight loss pills, so ignore any ads which pop up on this article. You certainly wouldn't want to click them over and over causing the slime merchants to lose 6 cents or so with each click.
Dave Nalle has worked as a magazine editor, a freelance writer, a capitol hill staffer, a game designer and a history professor. He now designs fonts for a living and lives with his family in a pimped-out duck blind just outside Austin. You can find his writings on politics and culture at The Elitist Pig and his writings about fonts, art and graphic design at The Scriptorium.
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http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/06/154812.php
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