We Sent Alex Jones' Infowars Supplements To A Lab. Here's What's In Them.
Alex Jones' wildly popular suite of Infowars supplements probably won't kill you, but extensive tests provided to BuzzFeed News have shown that they're
little more than overpriced and ineffective blends of vitamins and minerals that have been sold in stores for ages.
The independent test results are the work of Labdoor, a San Francisco–based lab that tests and grades dietary supplements. Labdoor ran full tests on six popular Infowars supplements to determine the exact makeup of each supplement and screen for various dangerous and illegal chemicals. It also investigated a few of the products that "claimed incredible benefits for what seemed like could just be simple ingredients."
"We tested samples in triplicate, and wherever possible, cross-checked those results with at least two independent analytical laboratories, so we have complete trust in our conclusions," Brian Brandley, Labdoor's laboratory director, told BuzzFeed News.
All of the test results were largely the same: The products are — more or less — accurately advertised. They don't contain significantly more or less of a particular ingredient than listed on the bottles, and there are no surprise ingredients. They're also reasonably safe, meaning they passed heavy metal contaminant screenings and tested free of stimulants, depressants, and other prohibited drugs.
But just because the products' ingredients matched their labels
doesn't mean they lived up to Jones' claims. Survival Shield X-2, for example, "is just plain iodine, the same stuff doctors used to pour on surfaces as a disinfectant," Labdoor's results read.
When the company tested Anthroplex, which retails for $29.95, it found that there was so little zinc that "if you're extremely zinc deficient, the value...is not going to be significantly helpful." The report notes that "you could actually get another zinc orotate supplement for around $5 WITH an impactful serving size," before concluding simply that "this product is a waste of money."
This claim — that the Infowars supplements often contained less effective serving sizes than their less expensive counterparts — was a running theme in Labdoor's results. In almost every example, Labdoor's tests and reviews describe the products as little more than heavily overpriced supplements with few health benefits, if any.
As Jones' popularity has risen, so has his supplements business, which sources have told BuzzFeed News largely funds Jones' highly controversial Infowars media empire — home to incendiary conspiracies including but not limited to #Pizzagate, that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, and that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich provided WikiLeaks with the DNC emails — in addition to acting as a kind of lifestyle-brand complement to Jones' particular brand of conspiracy-minded, fear-fueled programming.
“He can sell 500 supplements in an hour,” a former employee told BuzzFeed News this spring. “It's like QVC for conspiracy.” One estimate by New York magazine — which uses some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the number of reviews of supplements on Jones' Infowars Life Store — suggests that, with an average supplement price of $30, Jones could haul in $15,000,000 in sales over a two-year period. A second, less conservative estimate from the magazine puts the figure even higher — nearly $25,000,000 without including repeat customers (of which there are likely many).
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Originally Posted by sparebulb
I can spend my spare cash on funding the infowar, investing in gold, the occasional donation to RPF, vacations etc
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