The Diet Crimes of Metabolife

0:28What do you have? podcast i can't express to our listeners how many weeks of thinking about that you're more than a month i could have googled at any moment uh what okay tell me if this is problematic welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that will help you lose 10 pounds but you will be grinding your teeth for days honestly yes is that the twist of the episode that i spoiled it because it's methamphetamine i'm aubrey gordon i'm michael hobbs if you'd like to support the show you can do that on patreon.com slash maintenance phase oh the tiny repeating machine is back uh or you can subscribe on apple podcast it's the same audio content yeah there he is michael aubry today we are talking about one of the most popular diet pills of the sort of y2k era 90s into y2k okay the name of it is Metabolife 356.

1:28Wait, are they wrong about the number of days in the year? No, that is exactly the thought that I had every time I saw the fucking name, Mike. I was like, do you mean 365? Do you mean every day? Do you mean Metabolife every day? Is that because you get nine cheat days? They're like, you think I'm doing 356 days? No, it's... Once a month, you can just go nuts. 356 was the number that the lab assigned it when they were formulating it. It's the name of the founder, John 356. We... are beginning our story in the mid nineties. By this point, the eighties and nineties sort of fitness craze has grown into a massive industry.

2:05This is the era of buns of steel, of stop the insanity of sweating to the oldies. This is also a time when the popularity of MLMs are on the rise. Oh yeah. At this point, the burgeoning wellness industry is championing supplements and vitamins become much more widely used they sort of move from like a thing that crunchy granola hippies do to a much more mainstream thing this is when we get flintstones vitamins and that kind of thing right oh yeah and anxieties about weight are on the rise mostly in an individual way at this point and in sort of a cosmetic way yeah so michael i'd like you to imagine this with me it's 1994 you're watching TGIF and between an ad for Slim Fast and maybe like a Bop It are those snap bracelets that killed like 3 ,000 children?

3:00You see this ad

3:07with drug abuse spiraling the federal government has created special units to combat what they believe could be a more serious problem them. It's like soldiers like tooling up, like getting their gear together. Yeah. It looks like a scene from heat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The action is the juice.

3:31Okay. They're breaking into a house. They're like SWAT teaming into this like giant McMansion. They're disarming the security system. There's some night vision footage. It's all very serious. Very Osama bin Laden.

3:49what the hell it's only it's only vitamins the fda is conducting raids against natural vitamin users but vitamins are not drugs this harassment must stop vitamin c you know like in oranges protect your right to use vitamins call congress now what okay this is a bizarre ad so they're breaking into a house, the SWAT team going in, and then it's Mel Gibson. Jump scare, gremlin surprise, it's Mel Gibson. In the kitchen, in a bathrobe, like, I guess putting vitamins in his water or something, or like taking a vitamin, and they like, they're arresting him. Putting vitamins in his water? Or like, whatever, I don't know.

4:29Do you know how vitamins work? It's too early for this. My brain is not awake yet. Listener, it's 1020 a.m. All right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right. Don't unmask me. But it's like, they're basically lying to you here and creating a scenario that I assume does not actually exist. No, not one single solitary case that I'm aware of of anyone's house getting broken into for possession of vitamin C. Yeah, vitamin fucking C, which has been on the market for like many decades at this point. This is an ad that is bankrolled by the supplement industry designed to astroturf the idea that supplements are overregulated and that the government is on the precipice of some really perilous overreach, right?

5:15Yeah. There's a little bit of backstory here. In the 80s and early 90s, Congress had considered a number of bills that would have increased FDA oversight and requirements of supplement manufacturers. One of them would have standardized labeling for supplements and would have required ingredient disclosures at like a more detailed level. Oh, tyranny. That's actual government tyranny. No one was talking about raids. Right. No one was talking about confiscating supplements. No one was talking about charges for possession of supplements. They were talking about a label that tells you what's in it.

5:53It's so funny, like RFK Jr.'s whole fucking thing is like pushing back. It's like the conspiracy of big pharma and stuff. But it's like the supplement makers are such fucking scammers, dude. Yep. They don't even have to have fucking vitamins in their vitamins. They can just sell you anything. Those sort of coordinated lobbying efforts in the industry first really bore fruit with the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Wait, duh, huh, eh, ah, duh, yeah. I've been saying D-Shay. D-Shay away, as they always say on E-Calls Red Race. They're talking about drug relations. The D-Shay recategorized dietary supplements as food instead of drugs.

6:34Okay. So it was drafted primarily to do one thing, to define dietary supplements and exempt them, not only from the FDA's drug approval process, but from an FDA approval process at all. So supplement makers do not have to prove that an ingredient is safe before taking it to market. Love this. And it meant that the FDA could only restrict a supplement ingredient if it posed a quote significant and unreasonable risk if used as instructed. So the whole point of the law is like give the FDA less power over this. It is functionally like almost complete deregulation of the supplement industry. You don't know that what they put in there is what they said they put in there.

7:24You don't know that it's not contaminated with something like lead. You don't know that it is as potent or as non-potent as they say it is. You're just trusting Gwyneth with like your long-term health. And Gwyneth is like the best case scenario, honestly. It was signed into law by President Clinton in October of 1994. for D. Shea was co-sponsored by Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, and Orrin Hatch, notorious trash can Orrin Hatch, Republican from Utah, one of the longest serving trash cans, trash cans in Congress for both Harkin and Hatch, both the Democrat and the Republican. One of their largest campaign contributors for both of them was previous maintenance phase subject and weight loss super mlm herbal life oh really hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars what was the like stated argument for this that supplement makers should be able to like do what they need unencumbered by government uh incursion it's just like hollow anti-regulation yeah they should be free to innovate and it's like general god deregulation shit and it's like 1994 right so we're like coming in hot off of uh reagan and hw bush but think about think about how much less often mel gibson is getting raided in his home for having a vitamin supplement in the middle of the night this is the other thing that i do want to say about the fucking mel gibson ad is like that is also indicative of how much fucking money they had mel gibson was arguably the biggest movie star in the world in 1994 yeah and they are hiring him for a tv ad yeah that in itself, you should call Congress and be like, whatever they want, don't give it to them.

9:08These people have too much fucking money. Listen, sugar tits. Yeah. So, this is the environment in which Metabolife goes to market. Okay. It was a multi-level marketing company that, like Herbalife before it, sold herbal weight loss supplements, quote unquote. That's always a good sign when you can't buy it at a store or from a normal place. You have to call up somebody and their website doesn't say what they do or what it comes. That's how you know it works. When a friend from high school asks you to sell it. It was started by Michael Blevins and Michael Ellis, two dudes from the greater San Diego area who had been childhood friends.

9:46They're not gays, are they? I don't have to be mad at gays. No, they're not homosexuals. Because then I would have to support it. Especially if they were under 5 '8". You'd just start yelling representation matters. Short gay Michaels, I'm sorry. At the time that the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act passes. Ellis is bouncing around from one job to another. He reportedly worked for a time as a chauffeur, a real estate agent, and a private investigator. Oh no. Oh no is correct, Michael. I'm just like red flag, red flag, red flag. Again, there are two co-founders. There's Michael Ellis and Michael Blevins.

10:23Michael Ellis went on to write a book about Metabolife and he also became the face of the company. So we're going to focus more on him because we've heard more from him. In the book, he writes about a couple of his prior jobs in the 1980s before founding Metabolife. The first is as a police officer for the National City Police Department near San Diego. He writes at some length about how competitive the application process was, that there were 300 applicants for three open jobs and that he made the cut. Okay. But he also says he just needed the money and that, quote, a job with a gun sounded interesting.

11:07Cool. You had me at I wanted a gun. That's it. I want to buy your weight loss supplements. I'm already in. When he talks about the neighborhoods he policed, it is also not great. He has long passages about how run down the streets and buildings are. Nice. He goes on at length about the scourge of street gangs that are predominantly Latino. On one of those calls to the quote unquote gangbanger war zone. Nice. He ends up chasing someone who he says starts threatening to stab him and his partner with a screwdriver. Okay. Michael Ellis goes on to shoot this person who collapses and stops moving. According to Ellis, this young man is permanently disabled.

11:53as a result. Is he telling this as like, I like a, I'm a hero story. This is his story of being like, this is how I learned being a cop was not for me, but it's very odd that in the book, he only really talks about the impacts on his own emotional state. Right. Right. It doesn't really grapple with like the life this dude could have lived or the effect on his family or the implications for the community. There's no existential anything. It's like, I shot someone and I felt really bad and I didn't want to feel bad anymore. I can't believe a pathological individualist would go on to sell weight loss supplements.

12:27In 1990, after leaving the police force, Michael Ellis faces drug charges. By what? So he was charged because he had rented a house for the express purpose of cooking meth in it. My meth joke is true? Your meth joke is so much truer than you realize. Wait, he's literally cooking fucking meth and then he goes on to sell a weight loss pill? He and Michael Blevins, his future co-founder, rented a house, hired a cook, and attempted to make meth. They hired a meth cook? They hired a meth cook. You hire a meth cook? Writing the ad on Craigslist? It sounds like he was like, neither one of them was very good at being a drug kingpin.

13:07Ellis rented a house that the owners were trying to put on the market. So they kept getting things set up to cook meth. and then they'd get a notice from the landlord that like hey some buyers are coming by and they're like you have to put a blanket over the meth lab they have to like dismantle it and put it all away that's like the sitcom version of breaking bad like we gotta hide the meth lab again it's just heisenberg shrugging and looking into the camera like dude that's so funny that like he couldn't even cook the meth himself he had to delegate it he like he it was such a calculated plan, like I'm going to be a meth kingpin, that he like hired it.

13:47It's like opening a bakery or something. Well, now I have to hire some bakers. To their credit, both Blevins and Ellis turned themselves in and pled out. So the cops eventually found them and then they were like, yes, we did this and then got a plea deal. Again, this is a place where we don't have digitized records of other reporting from the time so much. Wait, so in his book, he says for no reason he just marched into the police station said hello i'm cooking meth he was like we had a conversation about it we decided it was the right thing and we wanted to be like upstanding guy and so we turned ourselves in there's no fucking way no a couple of fucking san diego dirt bags are turning themselves like absolutely not absolutely excuse me officer excuse me i i stole something yesterday i just want to let you know that i broke the law so you can punish me i cannot tell a lie Yeah.

14:36He must have gotten caught. Michael Ellis is sentenced to probation and Michael Blevins is sentenced to prison as the guy who hired the cook and transported the meth. So while Michael Blevins is in prison, Michael Ellis starts Metabolife. Okay. He's like, with my experience in meth, I went into diet supplements. Yeah, correct. so the story that michael ellis tells about this sort of in the press throughout and in his book is that he developed metabolife while his father was undergoing cancer treatment to help him combat fatigue and negative symptoms does he have any background in chemistry or anything no he's like a random guy he's a cop a chauffeur yeah what does that mean like i developed a how would you even do that as like a random civilian.

15:25He doesn't say. Yeah. In 1992, he starts selling it. Initially, he starts marketing it as a bodybuilding supplement at gyms in the sort of Gold's Gym era. And it's a weight loss thing or it's a muscle building thing? Right now he's saying it's a muscle building thing, but that doesn't work. So he goes, it's for weight loss. Those are opposite things, which is very funny. One of them helps you put on weight. The other one helps you take off weight. Correct. Yeah. The active ingredient is marketed as ma huang, a Chinese herbal supplement. That's true. That's an actual herb. That's an actual herb.

15:58Metabolife uses ma huang as an appetite suppressant, but historically in Chinese medicine, it was used as a cold remedy. Okay. The historical herbal use of ma huang is to make a tea out of the leaves that are not distilled down and crushed into a capsule and all of that kind of shit metabolite distributors are telling you to take this every day right that's why i take mucinex every day to make me feel a little bit healthier right it would be like if you were like i'm taking nyquil every fucking day of my life this is also it's such it's so funny thinking back on this time when you could just say like it's an ancient chinese ingredient and everybody like that is the entire herbal life model right and the entire metabolite model we now have two MLMs that are just like doing the full like ancient Chinese secret fucking bullshit.

16:43Totally. Metabolife distributors tell really extraordinary stories about its effectiveness in weight loss, eating whatever you want, still losing weight. Amazing. Wow. I feel incredible. They also brag after the passage of the DJ, they advertise that we're the only weight loss supplement that's lab tested for safety. Oh, what? But also they can just fucking say that because there's no regulation. They can just fucking lie. Yes, correct. Correct. Correct. And you called it. It's both Mahuong, 12 milligrams of Mahuong in a metabolite caplet and 40 milligrams of guarana concentrate. That's caffeine, baby.

17:25Wait, is it guarana? So it's about one espresso shot worth of caffeine. Okay. As the business is getting started as an MLM, Michael Blevins, he who is in prison, starts recruiting distributors in prison. Wait, really? Use your networks, baby. Get those Facebook messages out. I had real conflicted feelings about this. It's an MLM, so it is garbage from top to bottom. They are selling a product that is garbage from top to bottom. And also famously, the people who make money in an MLM are the first people to get in the door. So in this case, the prisoners got like rich off of it. They're like the first 10 people.

18:04So I was like, is this redistribution of wealth? And they're recruiting from their fucking networks. Yeah, they're fucking over people that they know. And the first 10 prisoners might make money, but the next 90 prisoners don't. Once Metabolife launches as a weight loss supplement and as an MLM in 1995, the business grows really big, really fast. In the first couple of years, it's profits. It's already turning a profit in the millions. No way. In the first like two years. In 1999, just four years after the launch, they report$1 billion in sales. I guess they just got in early after this law got passed.

18:45There's probably like a vacuum that they were able to fill and just making these insane health claims before essentially everybody started doing that. It was a crowded market. Yes. And it's not the only one using Mahuong. It's one of the most popular ones, but it's not the only one. There are also brands on the market. You may remember these. I definitely do. Xenodrin EFX. No. Hydroxycut. I may have even taken that one for a while. And one called, and I quote, herbal ecstasy. ecstasy it'll make you lick someone else's face but it's herbal wait i'm looking i googled i want to see their logo it's bad at this time oh it's so bad metabo life it's like bright yellow and there's like seven different fonts happening there's like a little gold seal yeah red font and it just says diet yeah herbal formula to enhance your and then it's like the font goes up like 50 sizes and it says diet oh and provide energy asterisk asterisk super small print all of these brands also get a big boost in 1997 a big windfall from the release of entrapment starring catherine jones and yeah everybody wanted to look like her snaking through those lasers no the boost they get in 1997 is that fen fen has pulled off the market oh right so fen fen miracle drug that stopped people's hearts.

20:06And the thing that we have done a previous episode on, if you would like to know that story, go back and listen to the Fen Fen episode. It is kind of a miracle that with a single pill, you can stop your heart. Incredible. He's been working on it for so long. So amazing. That winds up being quite a boon to the industry, right? You've got all these people who were on Fen Fen who are really dejected that it's like off the market because it didn't stop their heart. What the fuck? Yeah. And they're looking for something else. And actually these things you can get cheaper and at the gas station you don't even need to get a doctor involved you can get it from your neighbor yeah so these are now some of the biggest sort of like pill makers in the country right and they have a bunch of fucking money so their ads are all over tv yeah so we are going to watch a Metabolife ad from 2000.

20:55Fuck yes.

21:16By imitators, Metabolife is number one for a reason. Laboratory tested for safety and clinically shown to be There's an ugly label. Only available through Metabolife retailers and distributors. Call for the location nearest you. So for the listener, what is happening is that there is a guy wearing a trench coat who opens his trench coat and it's lined with like fake bottles of Metabolife. He's up late at night like meticulously sewing the extra pockets into his trench coat. He's like, I gotta be able to open the flap. This drug dealer has dedication. yeah so they're doing this weird thing where they're like implying that their competitors are like a shady and be like drugs and they are not drugs it's so funny for them to complain about like fly by night counterfeit yeah they're like take it from us a fucking cop who disabled someone but also a guy who doesn't cook the meth but does hire the guy who cooks the mess because you just made this up too you're just like you're just as much of a drug dealer as people selling counterfeit metabolite well michael the drug dealer plot thickens because the active ingredient mahuang is better known in english as ephedra wait what's ephedra ephedra is the name for the plant the plant has sub compounds uh called alkaloids called ephedrine and pseudo ephedrine oh that's the meth shit that's the shit you can't buy without id anymore yep correct dude that's the shit when whenever you're sick if you get like what is it called mucinex part d or some shit it's a full-on crack cocaine it's like the shit that you have to go to the store and like ask for the thing behind the counter i did this once because the uh suggested dose or whatever is two of them and i was like i've never taken this before i'll take one i felt like i could like lift a fucking volkswagen yes i'm like they tell you to take two of these fucking things so for americans who bought cold medicine before like the mid 2000s, you will recognize the brand name Sudafed.

23:18You can still get it. It's behind the counter. It's short for pseudoephedrine. That's what it was. In addition to its Chinese medicine use as a cold remedy, it was also used in the US for the same purposes. Until the 1980s, ephedrine was an over the counter cold and allergy medicine. I bet it clears out your fucking sinuses. Your heart is beating like 300 times a minute. Yeah. So ephedrine does, in fact, constrict your blood vessels and speed up your heart. For people with asthma, that means that it helps reduce the swelling in their airways and can genuinely be helpful for respiratory stuff. But it was ultimately banned by many, many states because of the safety risks and the risk of dependence.

24:07And it was also the basis for cooking meth, right? Yes. Pseudo-ephedrine as one of the sort of subcompounds was absolutely like a key ingredient in cooking meth, which is what ultimately got pseudo-ephedrine banned. That's why you have to show your ID because you can't just go into the store and buy like 300 packets of it because then they assume you're cooking a shitload of meth. And I believe it's not sold in the EU at all anymore. There was like a high risk of dependence. Yeah. There are major safety risks for selling something over the counter that speeds up your heart. Are you kidding me?

24:39I only took half the recommended dose. What if you took twice the recommended dose? I mean, it felt like you could like really hurt yourself. I was like, as soon as I took it, I was like, why is this legal? You know, we mentioned that this is predominantly used as a respiratory thing in the US in the 80s. I will say that they, honest to God, learned about the weight loss effects of ephedra during asthma research. so they're doing some research into the effects of ephedrine on asthma and the researchers are like man these asthma patients are getting real skinny they're tripping balls and they're like fighting and like biting each other all the time but look how trim they are very svelte skinny many god on the less intense end uh ephedrine users can experience jitteriness anxiety and insomnia on the more intense and ephedra does increase your heart rate.

25:32It does increase your blood pressure, which in turn can lead to cardiac events, stroke, all kinds of acute and really scary things. And on top of all of that, ephedrine users may even experience hallucinations, seizures and psychosis nice also there are people with ephedra allergies who might experience like their throat closing up right right that kind of thing and on top of all of that ephedrine like the methamphetamine that it is then used to make people can develop a tolerance really quickly right to a small amount and they need to up their dose so very quickly in order to get the same effects, people have to take more and more and more.

26:20And then you're talking about long-term health and side effects and everything else. Yes. You rebrand this thing that is just like a pharmaceutical. You rebrand it as like ancient Chinese medicine and people think they're taking something like natural and herbal. But I mean, everything is natural when you think about it. There are lots of parts of the natural world, not to get all Werner Herzog on it, but like, there are lots of parts of the natural world that are trying to kill you. It's all just marketing to be like, oh, it's Mahuang. It's very natural and ancient. It sounds like it's just fucking drugs.

26:47You're just like taking drugs. Yes. And the ingredient listed on Metabolife isn't just mahuang. It's mahuang concentrate. Right. So it's just like it's a fucking drug. You're taking Sudafed. Yeah. You're taking ephedrine. Also, didn't you say earlier that Metabolife is mahuang and caffeine, basically? Right. So research found at the time that the combination of ephedra and caffeine marginally increased weight loss over ephedra alone right well yeah probably fucking hell yeah you're on crack but caffeine like ephedra also increases your heart rate and your blood pressure it also increases the likelihood of those side effects and particularly the like vascular and cardiac effects right so adding caffeine to this is really like pouring lighter fluid yeah totally the risk side of it right and also this is something that you would want on like a warning label of like this is habit forming you can fucking overdose on this stuff i mean you can overdose on caffeine yes again this is like the perfect argument for the fucking fda to regulate this shit michael leave me with my panera lemonade in peace yeah exactly you can like really hurt yourself so unsurprisingly knowing all of this adverse reaction reports started to roll in with within just a year or two of Metabolife's launch, right?

28:08Metabolife comes onto the market as a weight loss supplement in 1995. And by 1997, there's this massive wave of adverse reaction reports. It's like, I only lost three pounds and I murdered my entire family. So the early adverse reactions that come in show reports of sudden hypertension in people without existing cardiovascular conditions. As with Herbalife before it, a lot of people didn't report their adverse reactions, right? Some assumed that because it was listed as herbal and because Metabolife touted that they were lab tested for safety, that it couldn't hurt them. So they didn't think to report that.

28:52They're just like, weird, mystery hypertension, right? Others assumed that their weight already put them at ill health. So they blamed their weight and not the medication again metabolife is launched in 1995 by 1996 multiple states are already proposing full or partial bans yes on ephedra it's crack when fen-fen is taken off the market it's september and just immediately thereafter ephedra supplements like metabolife start marketing themselves as quote-unquote herbal fen-fen yeah by november two months later the FDA is already issuing official warnings about ephedra use and the dangers of ephedra.

29:35Man. Still, the product continues to grow. The business continues to grow. And by 1999, the FDA reports over 1000 adverse reactions. Man. And 35 of those are deaths. Wait, what? People died? 35 people have died in four years that the FDA is tracking. What? Yes, correct. How do we pull Fen Fen and we didn't pull this shit? This is fucking crazy. So of course this leads to a wave of lawsuits. There are class action suits from consumers. There are suits from distributors, many of whom are also consumers. Yeah. But there are also lawsuits from Metabolife. Wait, what? They start suing people. Wait, who?

30:19So as these adverse events grow and more states consider bans on ephedra, so too does the negative media coverage as it fucking should. Yeah. Right. And when these negative news stories crop up, Metabolife often files suit for defamation. Again, great sign that you're running a real business. You're selling a useful product to people. In his book about metabolite, Michael Ellis writes about this wave of lawsuits and his reactions are nutso. Send it, send it, send it, send it. No, I'll send you a quote in a minute. Okay. But just as a preview, he has a passage and he talks about his power combo to prep for depositions.