What Kevin Trudeau doesn't want you to know

Afterward, Trudeau loudly complained that the FTC was censoring him and started a Web site called The Whistleblower, on which he tries to fashion himself as a new Ralph Nader -- a selfless consumer advocate opposing powerful institutions and defending regular folk. But Trudeau's claims of persecution and martyrdom are hard to swallow for many. "He wasn't censored -- that's just total fantasy," says Dr. Stephen Barrett, a health-fraud expert who runs a network of watchdog Web sites, including Quackwatch. "What's happened is that he's just not allowed to sell products with false claims. That's the only censorship going on."

"Trudeau is the undisputed king of false infomercial advertising," he continues. Barrett's alarm over Trudeau's tactics heightened with the coral calcium infomercial. "It was just one lie after another, all orchestrated by Trudeau," Barrett says. He isn't any more impressed by Trudeau's current infomercial for the bestselling "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About."

The book, which Trudeau self-published, is a paranoid mixture of self-evident and widely known health facts with very few, if any, natural cures. It is almost amusingly campy -- except that the information is so odd, and alarmist. "Natural Cures" is poorly sourced and peppered with jaw-dropping absurdities, such as "The sun does not cause cancer. Sun block has been shown to cause cancer" or "All over-the-counter nonprescription drugs and prescription drugs CAUSE illness and disease." Or, this tribute to logic and language: "If you read the labels of everything you put in your mouth, you would see the name [sic] of various chemicals. All the chemicals listed are dangerous man-made chemicals. They are poisons. If you were to take any of those chemicals and ingest a large amount at one time, you would probably die. Therefore they are in fact poisons."

His prose style mimics the gibberish favored by online spam advertisements, and he frequently uses SCREAM CAPS to emphasize OBVIOUS POINTS. At one point, Trudeau implies that he was an undercover government agent and that, because of his inside knowledge, the government and powerful corporations are out to get him -- though he doesn't share what any of his highly prized knowledge is. And always lurking somewhere is the nefarious "They" of the book's title -- the FDA and the FTC, who are in cahoots with the drug companies, which hold back the real natural cures because they won't make any money if you're healthy.

On every page, he stokes the paranoia and anger generated by recent high-profile corporate and government scandals, as well as the ire against the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. But don't worry, not only will his book save you, but you can also go to his Web site, NaturalCures.com, for more information and for the "real cures," all for a lifetime membership of $499 or a monthly fee of just $9.95. In essence, the infomercial sells the book, which sells the Web site --which nets Trudeau tons of money.

But there's nothing strictly illegal about Trudeau and "Natural Cures." Heather Hippsley, assistant director for the division of advertising practices at the FTC, who supervised the commission's case against Trudeau, explains: "Books are fully protected speech. He can author a book and voice his opinions ... The line is: Informational materials, OK. Products and services, banned."

Peer-review systems -- like the one in place on Amazon.com -- do their best work in warning potential buyers of bad or faulty products. On the Amazon site, over 500 people have weighed in on "Natural Cures" so far. Yet, although reviews have been almost overwhelmingly negative -- in Amazon's "star rating" scheme, the book is averaging a two -- sales haven't slowed. Despite headlines like "'Scams they don't want you to know about"; "Trudeau is worse than the drug companies!"; "Left feeling totally duped"; "Natural Cures he Contiunous [sic] Not to Tell U About"; and "The Book Just Simply Sucks," "Natural Cures" hovers at the top of the Amazon bestseller list week after week.

Indeed, all the negative Amazon reviews in the world probably won't keep people from checking out "Natural Cures." "What's driving sales is not people buying the book but people buying the infomercial," says Sam Catanese, president and CEO of Infomercial Monitoring Service, which tracks the direct-response television marketing industry. In fact, according to Catanese's data, "Natural Cures" was recently the most-run infomercial on television -- 139 times in one week. (The runner-up was a distant second, appearing 96 times.)

As for the television broadcasters' responsibilities in this issue, they've turned a blind eye to Trudeau and his type. "[The Federal Communications Commission] has never been inclined to take anyone's licenses away because the industry they nominally regulate actually regulates them," says Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. "The industry is too powerful to contend with, and regulation is largely farcical, except when there's political teeth biting, as in the case of Janet Jackson."

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