This is why we regulate pharmaceuticals.
Clonaid, Youth Pill Win Dubious Distinctions
THURSDAY, March 13 (HealthDayNews) -- Drum roll, please. It's time to announce the second annual Silver Fleece Awards, which are handed out each year to the product and organization that make the most outrageous or exaggerated claims about human aging.
This year's Silver Fleece Award for an anti-aging product goes to a substance called Longevity. It's sold on the Internet by Urban Nutrition Inc. and costs $44.99 for 90 pills.
Longevity and many other products that make outlandish anti-aging claims have never been proven to do anything but line the pockets of the people who sell them, notes one of the three scientists who served as a judge in a prepared statement.
Curiously, the Web site for Longevity claims a list of famous patients -- John Wayne, Yul Brenner, Anthony Quinn, Princess Caroline of Monaco -- who all happen to be dead.
The "lucky" winner of the Silver Fleece Award for an anti-aging organization goes to Clonaid, the controversial company that claimed in December it had cloned the world's first human baby.
Clonaid was founded by the leader of a religious organization called the Raelian Movement who claims that cloning will enable mankind to reach eternal life.
This award "recognizes the organization that contributes the most to disseminating misinformation and/or products associated with the claim that human aging can be stopped or reversed," the judges said.
The Silver Fleece award, a bottle of vegetable oil labeled "Snake Oil," was to be presented Thursday at the joint conference of the National Council on Aging and the American Society on Aging in Chicago. Neither recipient was there.
The three judges of the Silver Fleece Awards are experts on aging. Last year, they issued a position paper along with dozens of other scientists warning the public that no currently marketed product, therapy or any other form of intervention has yet been proved to slow, stop or reverse human aging.
