muscletech.com VS.

gasparinutrition.com

The term “snake oil” has long been associated with any dietary supplement that made health claims, usually devoid of proven supplement facts, of their product. The concept goes back to the pioneer days, when a traveling salesman hawked an anti-inflammatory, made from a proprietary blend that contained actual Chinese water snakes. Based on today's supplement facts, the stuff worked. High in omega-3 fatty acids from the snakes, daily supplements made from the snake oil actually reduced inflammation and eased the symptoms associated with arthritis. It wasn't long until an enterprising pitchman decided to make his own snake oil and travel town to town selling it. However, due to the paucity of Chinese water snakes being raised in the boom towns of the wild west, his proprietary blend used rattlesnakes. This of course was devoid of any scientific fact that would demonstrate that the rattlesnake supplement represented a reasonable facsimile for the original brand with the Chinese snakes. He made a show of it though. His sales pitch reportedly included taking a live rattler out of a sack, slitting it open and dropping it into a pot of boiling water. Little to none of the rendered snake made it into the bottle though. It was filled, mostly, with nothing more than mineral oil. Thus giving birth to the “snake oil salesman.” Today, claimed benefits of dietary supplements have to follow guidelines spelled out in the dietary supplement regulations contained in the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA). From what's contained in “proprietary blends,” marketing and label claims, claimed supplement facts, and more, are subject to dietary supplement regulation under DSHEA. Since DSHEA's genesis in 1994, the FDA has taken an ever increasingly active role in regulating dietary supplements. This makes snake oil label claims much more difficult today. Copy and content writers have to be extremely careful when choosing their words so as not to make “drug-like”