LinkThe Council for Responsible Nutrition
(CRN) has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate deceptive business practices by ConsumerLab.com and take appropriate action.
The CRN complaint states that ConsumerLab.com -- which represents itself as a consumer watchdog testing dietary supplements -- is in reality a for- profit company that solicits money from the makers of products it plans to have tested. Those that pay have positive results highlighted and negative results quashed; those that don't pay have negative results highlighted and positive results obscured.
"Until now, nobody has looked behind the curtain and exposed
ConsumerLab.com's tactics," said CRN President Annette Dickinson, Ph.D. "It is a business, not a watchdog -- one that intimidates manufacturers to pay for its services. We ask the FTC to lift the veil this company uses to disguise its true nature."
ConsumerLab.com promotes itself as "a leading provider of consumer information and independent evaluations of products that affect health and nutrition." Contrary to the image it projects of an actual testing facility, ConsumerLab.com essentially is a three-person operation, and its business address is a UPS drop box in White Plains, N.Y. It farms out product testing, but does not make public the identity of the laboratories it uses.
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