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With hundreds of natural-sounding treatments on store shelves vying for our attention, it's hard to know what works.
And with sales of 3x Slimming Power supplements, diet treatments and personal care products in the billions of dollars, many consumers look at products and wonder: Is it a cure-all or a cash-grab?
CBC's Marketplace checked out four popular treatments, a detox cleanse, an anti-aging skin cream, a popular cold remedy along with a diet treatment and tested the promises they create. The episode "Remedy or Ripoff?" airs on CBC-TV on Oct. 24 at 8 p.m. (8:30 p.m. NT).
Stick to the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #toogoodtobetrue.
To avoid getting lured in by marketing tactics, here are five signs to watch for that may indicate the merchandise inside your hand is more ripoff than remedy.
CBC's Marketplace: Natural remedy or ripoff?
Dr. Oz selling 'fairy dust' says medical ethicist
1. "Clinically proven"
Although this can sound like a product has got the scientific stamp of approval, it's worth giving this label another glance, Perry Romanowski, a cosmetic chemist located in Chicago, told Marketplace co-host Tom Harrington.
"On the one hand it does imply that some kind of testing ended," he states.
"But the word clinically proven or clinically tested doesn't have any industry standard. There's a wide range of what that actually means."
And, he adds, any testing that was done might not cover all of the product's claims.
Many times, it depends upon the standard -- and type -- of study that was done.
Marketplace investigated a costly anti-aging skin cream and found that a few of the clinical research was self-reported effects by a small group of women.
Marketplace also tested the science behind a cold treatment. What did the studies show? If you take the pills for 17 cold and flu seasons, you need to get one less cold.
2. Promises fast results
Dr. George Dresser, a toxicologist, pharmacologist and internal medical specialist at Western University working in london, Ont., is wary of health products that promise fast results.
He says the "desire for convenient fixes -- the idea that you are able to take something for six days, 7 days, Thirty days, and end up with an instantaneous improvement in your health -- is a very attractive concept."
Some popular diet treatments on the market may sell pricey products, but it might actually function as the diet plan this is the key to any weight loss.
"If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you slim down, and that is true on any program," Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, a professional in nutrition and weight reduction, told co-host Erica Johnson.
3. Celebrity endorsement
A large diet supplements can provide many treatments the environment of respectability.
But because the U.S. Senate hearings with Dr. Mehmet Oz last summer made clear, celebrity endorsements, even by prominent a celebrity doctor, don't suggest the method is better or perhaps works.
"When you call a product a miracle, and it's something can purchase and it's something which gives people false hope, I just don't understand why you need to visit," Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill believed to Oz in the hearing on bogus diet products held in July.
"I do not get why you ought to say these items because you know it's not true."
4. "Natural"
A very appealing catch-all term, the word natural can, actually, mean hardly any.
Just about anything can be viewed as to have a natural origin, says Romanowski, and even naturally derived ingredients can still be highly processed.
"The the truth is that any company can call their product natural and there is a fair quantity of greenwashing that goes on in the cosmetic industry.
"They take a regular product, sprinkle in certain extract, put it in a green package, provide a grassy kind of scent and call it natural."
5. Trendy scientific buzzwords
"Detoxification," "stem cells" and other medical-sounding terms can give cure the sheen of science, but there are good reasons to give these items a skeptical look.
Research made by the U.K. research group the Voice of Young Science found that among popular detox regimes, no two companies defined "detoxification" exactly the same way.
Romanowski says that including a graph or perhaps a molecule in advertising or packaging can make consumers believe a product's claims.
"Marketers have 3 Day Fit known for years that if you make something sound sciencey and techy, which makes people think, naturally, that it's likely to work better, even when the terms are simply composed," he says.
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