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A beautiful woman in a grass skirt and scallop shells covering her breast beckons me to buy a bottle of Polynesian noni juice , the latest health philosopher’s stone to make the passage from multi - tied marketing schema to major outlets like Costco .

Although she ’s just a two - dimensional model glue on the bottleful , she ’s alluring enough to make many a customer dismiss noni ’s steep price , awful taste and utterly false health claims .

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Go Ahead, Drink Bacon Grease for Breakfast

agree to this label , Polynesians have used noni juice for C to heal the mind , consistence and liveliness , although a minuscule star after this statement separate me the FDA does n’t harmonise .   Dr. remain to unlock the juice ’s innate wellness secrets , although another asterisk indicates this financial statement is put on , too .

connection sites selling noni title it cures everything from colds to cancer — well , at least the ones that have n’t been shut down by the Federal Trade Commission .   Noni succus , it seems , has all the mark of tough music : usurious health claims , small grounds for these claims , and questionable marketing .

Trouble in heaven

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Noni grows easily in warm climates throughout Southeast Asia and the South Pacific .   The biting , ripe yield is a ruffianly deglutition , though , eff in many tongues as the vomit yield or rotten Malva sylvestris yield , and is use up commonly only in dearth .   Many South Pacific cultures use noni in traditional medicine .

Most noni juice sold in the United States contain a dash of noni cut with pee and other juice to make it palatable .   Noni juice is said to amend or cure arthritis , Crab , high cholesterol , diabetes , obesity , impotence and so on .   It is usually sell as Polynesian , Tahiti or Hawaiian noni .

If Polynesians readily squander noni juice , as marketer claim , then the results are certainly minimum .   Sadly , as a result of colonization , land confiscation and forced changes in lifestyle and diet , many Polynesians from the South Pacific through the Hawaiian Islands are in poor wellness .

An illustration of Clostridium bacteria

In Gallic Polynesia , home to Tahiti , 45 percentage of adult female are obese and nearly another 30 percent are overweight , consort to the World Health Organization .   In parts of the Federated States of Micronesia , up to 80 percentage of the population are obese and 50 percentage are diabetic , according to the WHO .   That slender lady on the bottle is an illusion .

Native Hawaiians are twice as potential to get diabetes and closely six sentence more probable to decease from it compare to whites on the island , harmonize to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .   Health experts are trying to get the local populations to work out more and to shun the western influence of fag , alcohol , and fatty and piquant processed food , not salute more noni .

Trouble in the lab

A close-up image of the face of a bat with their wings folded under their face

Heinicke , now with the noni manufacture , claims that xeronine is an essential food that enable protein to introduce and exit cellular walls .   Noni also contains pro - xeronine , Heinicke say , which is converted to xeronine in the large bowel .   While not farfetched , none of this has been prove , and Heinicke ’s oeuvre remains a mystery to researchers today .

Aside from the xeronine " discovery , " noni marketers point to a 1994 health study from the University of Hawaii showing how noni heal a certain eccentric of lung cancer in research lab mice .   While promising , this result was borderline and relied on a protocol not endorsed by the National Cancer Institute .

Several more promising laboratory experiments have since been perform .   Like oranges , noni might contain anti - cancer properties .   Yet these minimally confident subject area entailed injecting high concentrations of noni directly into an fauna ’s cancerous organ or into a run tube with cancerous cubicle .   Drinking noni — in the paltry concentration our taste buds will allow — has not been shown to countermand or slow cancer in any creature .

An illustration of microbiota in the gut

More illness than cures

A little scientific discipline goes a long elbow room in the alternative medicine world , which is why connection sites take that noni is " clinically proven " to bring around cancer and handle other disease .   We ’re not there yet .   Noni , like so many other traditional medicine works , may well have remedial place .   Only more inquiry will distinguish .

But noni is not exclusively safe .

An illustration of mitochondria, fuel-producing organelles within cells

There have been several documented cases of individuals damaging their liver after drinking noni .   More rough-cut is a kidney - related disease call hyperkalemia , or mellow potassium levels in the bloodstream .   People prone to hyperkalemia know to avoid banana or orange succus , naturally high in potassium , but many are unaware of the high potassium layer in noni .

The alternate food pyramid

Consumers should also be aware of multi - level selling , or Great Pyramid strategy , link up with noni .   Noni for cut-rate sale in stores seems lawful , aside from the bit about being a useless health product .   But around the creation , noni is often sold by independent distributer who recruit other distributer to enroll other distributors and so on .

a close-up of a mosquito

These distributors are athirst for your dollar , tear $ 30 - 100 for a month supply with instructions to wassail the stuff at vary doses for months if not twelvemonth .

With rearing obesity , diabetes and malignant neoplastic disease in this creation , one would think that a product that can cure obesity , diabetes and genus Cancer would attract praise from MD .   Instead noni draw in the typical mix of profit - thirsty marketers and in question medical experts who write the books and work for the noni makers .   Be strong and say " no " to the hot baby in pot wench .

Christopher Wanjek is the writer of the book “ Bad Medicine ” and “ Food At employment . ” Got a question about Bad Medicine ? Email Wanjek . If it ’s really bad , he just might serve it in a future column . Bad Medicine appears each Tuesday on LIveScience .

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