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By Root 739 0

Kevin Trudeau, the author of a book that topped the New York Times best-seller list for a time in the summer of 2005: Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About. Trudeau pumped up sales with a massive campaign of late-night infomercials in which he claimed that “there are in fact natural, non-drug, and non-surgical cures for virtually every disease.” His basic claim—an appeal to cynicism that he repeated over and over—was that “they” were conspiring to suppress information about known cures: “The drug companies don’t want you to know the truth, the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. government does not want you to know the truth. Why? Because it would cost them too much money in profits if you knew the inexpensive, natural remedies.”

Trudeau’s pitch is that “they” are lying but he will tell you the truth. Just buy his $14.95 book ($39.95 on audio CDs,) or subscribe to his $71.40-a-year newsletter, or become a $999 “lifetime member.” And, oh, yes, buy his $19.95 weight-loss CD, whose title is, he claims, “censored by the Federal Trade Commission.” Did you know the FTC is in on the conspiracy, too? As is the food industry, which, Trudeau claims, is putting unspecified ingredients in “diet” products that actually make people fat. No wonder we can’t lose weight! The “censored” title: How to Lose 30 Pounds in 30 Days, just the sort of extravagant and unsupported claim the FTC often cites as misleading advertising.

We call Trudeau’s pitch an appeal to cynicism because he is trading on the public’s belief the federal government can’t be trusted, and that big corporations—especially pharmaceutical companies—pursue profit so blindly that they are capable of almost any villainy. We might agree that some of the practices of drug companies justify criticism, but Trudeau is hoping you will automatically—cynically—accept his claim that big companies and the government are secretly conspiring to make you fat. This tactic has made untold millions of dollars for him, unless he’s conning the public about that, too. His company once claimed to have sold 4 million copies of his book alone. His marketing plan must still be working, because in May 2006 he came out with a sequel: More Natural Cures Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease.

But here’s why you should be skeptical—of Trudeau. Just do a little research using any Internet search engine and you will quickly discover a few facts about this master salesman:

• Trudeau has a criminal past. He served nearly two years in federal prison after a 1991 guilty plea to credit card fraud in which he bilked American Express of $122,735.68. In 1990, he served twenty-one days in jail and got a three-year suspended sentence on a Massachusetts state conviction for larceny after depositing $80,000 of worthless checks. At the time, he was posing as a doctor.

• Trudeau has been repeatedly cited for false advertising. In 1998, he agreed to pay $500,000 to settle FTC charges that he appeared in a string of infomercials that claimed, among other things, that his “Mega Memory System” could enable anyone to achieve a photographic memory. In 2003, the FTC and FDA charged him with falsely claiming in infomercials that a dietary supplement called Coral Calcium Supreme could cure cancer. He agreed to stop making such claims but then continued to do so anyway, leading a federal judge in Chicago to find him in contempt of court. Later in 2004, Trudeau agreed to pay $2 million to the FTC and to cease making infomercials selling any product at all, except for “informational” material, which is protected by the First Amendment. That was when he switched from selling pills to selling books, CDs, and newsletters.

The $2.5 million that Trudeau has paid to settle earlier false-advertising cases is probably chump change compared to what he’s taking in from a public made gullible by its own cynicism. It is easy to see why Trudeau’s appeal works so well. Politicians love to blame “corporate greed” whenever prices go up, and Hollywood loves to cast corporate executives as villains