I'm coming down with a cold. And it's going to be a bad one, I suspect. And I blame President Bush. Not for giving me the cold, but for making the symptoms worse. Here's why.
There was a story in today's WSJ that the safety nannies have been giving the makers of Pom a hard time for claiming that there are health benefits to drinking pomengrate juice:
Fewer than 4% of Americans had tried the fruit before 2002, when marketing mavens Lynda and Stewart Resnick launched the 100% fruit juice they call POM Wonderful. It's since become a top seller, in its curvy hourglass-shaped bottle.
The Resnicks, who also owns the Teleflora and FIJI water businesses, invested in orchards in California in the 1980s. They've also commissioned research on the anti-oxidant properties of pomegranates—too much research, according to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint last month alleging deceptive advertising. "Any consumer who sees POM Wonderful products as a silver bullet against all diseases has been misled," said David Vladeck, who runs the agency's Bureau of Consumer Protection.
This is hyberbole—no POM ads claim the pomegranate can cure "all diseases." But the complaint is a stalking horse for the agency's more radical position: that health-food companies now need to get Food and Drug Administration approval for scientific claims, similar to the process pharmaceutical companies follow for drugs.
In the case of Pom, it looks like there's actual scientific evidence that pomegranate juice has some health benefits. But so what?
Suppose people believed that pomegranate juice was good for them. So they switch from drinking soft drinks to Pom. And some of them, believing that Pom is good for them, really do get better from whatever ails them. Isn't that a good thing?
Placebos work, after all, at least for some people. Some of my fellow UCLA faculty have proven it:
... for some people, the placebo works nearly as well as the medication. ... Placebos are thought to act by stimulating the brain's central reward pathways by releasing a class of neurotransmitters called monoamines, specifically dopamine and norepinephrine. These are the brain chemicals that make us "feel good." Because the chemical signaling done by monoamines is under strong genetic control, the scientists reasoned that common genetic variations between individuals - called genetic polymorphisms - could influence the placebo response. ...
Leuchter noted that this is not the sole explanation for a response to a placebo, which is likely to be caused by many factors, both biological and psychosocial. "But the data suggests that individual differences in response to placebo are significantly influenced by individual genotypes," he said.
What does all this have to do with Bush? I'm getting there.
For a long time, I've taken Airborne religiously at the first sign of a cold. At first, it really seemed to work. My colds were a few days shorter and the symptoms were not as bad. Really.
But then back in 2008 I started reading stories in the press about how the Bush FTC was going after the makers of Airborne for making false claims. Specifically, the FTC complaint that "there is no competent and reliable scientific evidence to support the claims made by the defendants that Airborne tablets can prevent or reduce the risk of colds, sickness, or infection; protect against or help fight germs; reduce the severity or duration of a cold; and protect against colds, sickness, or infection in crowded places such as airplanes, offices, or schools."
Ever since then, Airborne doesn't seem to work as well. I still take it, but my colds seem to last longer and be more severe. The same thing happened to behavioral economist and Predictably Irrational author Dan Ariely:
Assume Airborne is/was a placebo. As far as I can tell from some cursory research, open placebos can work but no where near as well as closed ones. As Ariely says, you have to at least mostly believe it works. So telling people something is a placebo seriously undermines its effectiveness. Even so, the FTC turned Airborne into an open placebo without so much as a by your leave.
As long as something like Airborne is not hurting people, why should the government come along and advertise the fact that it's a placebo? If millions of people are getting over their colds faster and with less suffering, isn't that a good thing? And, if so, shouldn't the government just keep its damn mouth shut? (All the more so in the case of Pom, where there apparently is preliminary evidence that it has benefits?)
Which is why I blame Bush.
