Business Blog
Even Superheroes Need Substantiation
As part of its ongoing probe of questionable claims involving kids’ health, the FTC announced a $2.1 million settlement with major dietary supplement marketers for allegedly deceptive claims that their products promote healthy brain and eye development in children.
The FTC charged NBTY and two subsidiaries, NatureSmart and Rexall Sundown, Inc., with making misleading representations about the amount of DHA – an Omega-3 fatty acid – in their line of Disney- and Marvel Heroes-licensed children’s multivitamin gummies and tablets.
For example, the front panel of the Disney Princesses Gummies featured a pink crystal heart that said with DHA*. The asterisk refers to a statement on the side panel that read *DHA is naturally found in the brain and the eyes. 100 mg promotes healthy brain and eye development. **One serving provides 100 mcg of DHA. Thus, according to the FTC, a daily serving of the multivitamin for four-year-olds actually contained only 1/1000th of the 100 mg amount – 100 micrograms or 0.1 milligram. The FTC’s lawsuit also charged the companies with making unsupported claims that a daily serving promoted healthy brain and eye development in kids.
The products featured a veritable Who’s Who of the kindergarten set, including Spider Man, Captain America, Ironman, Winnie the Pooh, Snow White, Cinderella, and characters from the movies “Finding Nemo,” “Wall•e,” “Toy Story,” and “Cars.” Parents bought the vitamins at national chains like CVS, Kroger, Meijer, Rite Aid, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart.
In addition to $2.1 in consumer refunds, the settlement bars the companies from:
- misrepresenting the amount of any ingredient in any product; and
- misrepresenting that any ingredient – including DHA – promotes brain or eye health or provides any other health benefit, unless the claim is true and backed by competent and reliable scientific evidence.
Details of the refund program for people who bought the Disney and Marvel multivitamins will be announced soon. Consumers looking for the latest info on refunds in FTC cases can find it here.
It is your choice whether to submit a comment. If you do, you must create a user name, or we will not post your comment. The Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes this information collection for purposes of managing online comments. Comments and user names are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) public records system, and user names also are part of the FTC’s computer user records system. We may routinely use these records as described in the FTC’s Privacy Act system notices. For more information on how the FTC handles information that we collect, please read our privacy policy.
The purpose of this blog and its comments section is to inform readers about Federal Trade Commission activity, and share information to help them avoid, report, and recover from fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are welcome, and we encourage comments. But keep in mind, this is a moderated blog. We review all comments before they are posted, and we won’t post comments that don’t comply with our commenting policy. We expect commenters to treat each other and the blog writers with respect.
We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above. The comments posted on this blog become part of the public domain. To protect your privacy and the privacy of other people, please do not include personal information. Opinions in comments that appear in this blog belong to the individuals who expressed them. They do not belong to or represent views of the Federal Trade Commission.