So, here’s a brief outline of what I’ve learned. Xango juice is sold as a dietary supplement by an MLM organization. Its benefits are supposed to center around its antioxidants, particularly the xanthones it gets from the rind of the mangosteen fruit.
Anti-oxidants, in general, are a popular bit of pseudo-scientific woo these days. There’s little evidence that anti-oxidant supplements have a beneficial health effect — some early studies showed promise, but later, larger clinical trials showed those effects to be mistaken. The Journal of the AMA had an article last year covering a meta-study of prior anti-oxidant trials, and found that there’s some evidence that too much intake actually has negative health effects.
Oregon State University’s Linus Pauling Institute did a study on anti-oxidants and found that their actual anti-oxidant properties are mostly destroyed by the digestive tract before they get to where they can do any good.
Xango juice isn’t unusual in its anti-oxidant properties. There are other juices you can buy in your local grocery store (black cherry, and particularly blueberry) that have significantly more antioxidants in them.
Xango juice is unusual in its marketing. It’s a dietary supplement sold by an MLM, selling for around $40/l, more than ten times the cost of blueberry juice. One of the really complicated legal aspects of dietary supplements has to do with the way they’re advertised: they must not be pitched as the cure for any disease. It’s permissible to make claims of general health support (e.g., glucosamine promotes health joints), but specific claims (_e.g., glucosamine helps reduce arthritis) are verboten.
MLMs, on the other hand, are notorious for questionable advertising. It’s not necessarily an intentional thing, but it’s a side-effect of the organizational structure. MLMs are basically pyramid of distributorships for a product. The central organization (XanGo) produces a product, which the distributors at the bottom of the pyramid then sell. So, while the XanGo organization itself produces advertising that (presumably) carefully complies with FDA regulations on dietary supplements, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the hundreds of thousands of individual distributors are even fully aware of the regulations, much less in compliance.
This works to the advantage of the MLM — they get to skirt the FDA regulations with relative impunity, at least for a while. (The poster mentioned Herbalife, which went through some very serious legal action a few years ago, in part for this.)
Wikipedia has a list of forty-eight MLM companies, some operational, some defunct. At least twenty-five of them primarily sell either dietary supplements or cosmetics. I think it’s a little telling that the single most common business area among them is health and beauty supplements — areas that the FDA normally regulates.
While there are “legitimate” MLMs (Avon and Mary Kay being the prototypes for the business model), there are a lot of really questionable products that benefit from this sort of two-level advertising, where a national-level organization promotes brand identity, while a local-level “guerrilla-style” marketing campaign operates in parallel and with far less oversight. The whole business model shows a history of enabling fraud.
So, on the whole, I’d say that Xango juice has little to recommend it, and a lot against it.
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Xango Juice I think is a good direct selling company. We should be health conscious now.
Xango Religion
