One day last summer, a customer service representative for a company called Crystalite Salt received a phone call from Jennifer Lardge, a physicist. Lardge was curious about the science behind one of their products: lumps of salt, called lamps, that are meant to improve your health when they are heated. "I was looking at your Web site and I was just wondering about how salt lamps actually work," Lardge said.
"Right," responded the Crystalite Salt customer service representative.
"Well I was just wondering how they release the ions?"
"It's when it's warmed. The heat from the bulb or the candle. And it's like a reaction with the salt that then produces the ions."
"OK, it's just I have studied science a little and I was thinking that the bonds that hold the salt ions together are quite strong and I was wondering if there...
The researchers were particularly irritated by companies that used scientific-sounding claims to back their products and market them to the public. Like Lardge, several of the researchers took it upon themselves to call up some of the companies whose advertisements they'd noticed and ask some more questions about the scientific research that went - or didn't - go into them. (Both the US and UK allow supplement products to be marketed without explanation of scientific efficacy, but they still have to abide by truth in advertising rules.)
This fall, Sense about Science released transcripts of 11 conversations that researchers had with customer service people. Harriet Ball, a biologist at Kings College London, called Nestlé about their Ski Yoghurts, which she had noticed had been recently re-marketed as containing "Active8" - a complex of eight B vitamins that, according to Nestlé, optimized energy release. She was put through to the nutritionist at Nestlé. "Is it also helpful to people who've got a good diet anyway, and have enough B vitamins already in their diet?" asked Ball.
"Well," the nutritionist responded, "if people have got enough B vitamins in their diet already, what it'll do, it'll optimize that."
"What do you mean optimize?"
"Well, it will get the most out of your diet anyway, by using the vitamins and minerals that's already in your healthy diet."
Eric de Silva, a physicist and staff member at Sense About Science, called the manufacturers of the Q-link pendant, a metal pendant worn around the neck and advertised to protect from electromagnetic radiation, cure hangovers and skin conditions, improve your golf game, and reduce road rage. The customer service representative tried to explain how the pendant worked: "Well, you have an energy field because of the electrical impulses your body puts out. Your own, it's called a bio-field, the energy field around your body."
"So, there are the impulses for your nerves, you're saying?" asked de Silva.
"Um, yeah, yeah."
"OK, so this thing, the pendant...acts against it somehow? Or..."
"It acts with it."
"It acts with it?"
"Yeah, it aligns with it and helps amplify your own energy, it externalizes it more."
"So what does that do? I mean, so if you have a nerve impulse traveling and it generates a field, and then the pendant makes that field bigger, what does that...?"
"It helps protect your body from the electromagnetic frequencies from computers and electronic equipment...and cell phones."
The makers of the Q-link pendent said they conducted double-blind studies with the product, but they wouldn't reveal the specific elements and procedures to make Q-link.
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