The nice folks at NPR have done us all a favor and taken some used Kinoki foot pads to be tested to see if they’d drawn anything out of a guinea pig reporter’s body. Guess what? They didn’t.
Reporter Sarah Varney bought some Kinoki foot pads and wore them to bed. She also subjected her husband to the (alleged) detox treatment. In the morning, they both awoke to the stinky brown mess that the advertisement had promised. Not convinced that the brown stuff had actually come from their bodies, our hero took the foot pads to a lab and had them analyzed and compared with unused pads.
“Compared to the blank that’s almost identical,” said the scientists. “It looks like three of the same sample, basically.”
A doctor from UC Berkeley confirms the scam diagnoses. Your body already eliminates “metabolic waste” and “toxins” through, um, other means…
“For many hundreds of thousands of years we’ve been successfully eliminating them through the usual means, which is urine and feces, and there has been no demonstrated need to accelerate that.”
So what is all that gunk in the pad? We’re not really sure, but it shows up if you hold the pad over a pot of boiling water. Who knew steam had “metabolic waste”?
Japanese Foot Pad Is Latest Health Fad [NPR]
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I am shocked, SHOCKED, to hear this.
Now, what am I going to do with all of these debunked footpads?! I KNEW I should’ve waited for the study to come out…
I guess I’ll put them with my timeshare after I get done with my Pyramid Meeting Group…
I think the brown stuff on the pad is your soul.
@Jabberkaty: Which pyramid scheme did you get sucked into? Cashscam? :p
i got a free ipod for ordering these…
sounds like the company producing the product proscribes to P.T. Barnums point of view
…but they were advertised on TV! How could they possibly claim all those things on TV if they weren’t true?!?
The lab must have screwed up, and the doctor is a quack!
/sarcasm mode OFF/
my first clue was the catchy clogan of “Experince the Natural Power of Nature.”
prats.
@valarmorghulis: slogan even…stupid morning.
Oh, no! Next you’ll tell me there’s no Michael’s Claus.
I saw an ad for these besides a farting teddy bear ad in the newspaper Sunday lol
My first clue was “Free pads for life.”
In the old mill town where I grew up there were old faded signs on some of the buildings for things like “Carters Liver Pills”. I remember asking my parents why they didn’t sell these old health remedies anymore. They told me that a law had been passed a long time ago to prevent companies from selling medical products that did not work.
What happened to these laws? It seems like we have entered a new golden age for snake oil salesmen.
By the way, these foot pads are for sale in the latest version of the “SkyMall” catalog on the airlines.
@Nettwerk: The farting teddy bear probably does a better job at eliminating toxins…
I have a coworker who swears by these. She claims they help her wake up in the morning, but she has a permanent IV of coffee so I think that’s a contributing factor.
It’s weird because she dismisses things like acupuncture, meditation, homeopathic medicine, and yoga as “liberal propaganda” and “witchcraft”. (Her exact words, not mine)! It’s not as if she is the type to buy into anything and everything “Eastern”, so I’ve always been a bit curious about these weird little pads. It must be one hell of a placebo effect because she is addicted to them.
I’m a sucker for just about everything I see on TV (I still want one of those pasta cooking tubes where you fill it with boiling water), and even I wouldn’t try that junk.
Shocked! Shocked I say!
Are you going to tell me Santa Claus isn’t real either? Then who eats those milk and cookies?
The brown stuff on the pad is your common sense and/or dignity.
It’s sin.
Its the floof that L Ron was saying we need to goof.
But they promised to remove toxins from my body just like roots take toxins from trees and deposit them into soil! With ‘science’ like that behind them, how could they possibly be a scam??!!
Your liver eliminates toxins from your body, not your foot.
My liver works overtime eliminating toxins from my body
I saw a report on these somewhere. It’s just dried/powdered wood alcohol, which turns brown when it reacts with the moisture in your skin.
It’s like I just found out about the Easter Bunny all over again. I’m crushed
I hope this company is taking this very seriously. They need to rethink their business plan into somehow twisting this into more sales
@EyeHeartPie: Look, I just have to pay in a little more to reach the next tier….
Oh neat, my pen pal from Nigeria just wrote back.
@Milo.Stone: “I still want one of those pasta cooking tubes where you fill it with boiling water“
I had one of those once. The pasta came out a little hard, but i’m 99.9 % sure I didnt follow the directions.
I was listening to this in the car yesterday, laughter abound.
There was some chemical in the pad that turns black/brown when it gets moist, pretty smart actually.
@bdgbill: You can sell any health scam, for the most part, if you just label it “alternative medicine” or a “supplement”. Basically, all the quacks went to Congress and got a gaping loophole opened in the law.
They should tackle those HD Sunglasses and their amazing “glare ray” blocking ability next.
@Jesse: Sunglasses that block the rays when people glare at me?? Sold!
@Milo.Stone: I got the pasta cooking thing. It cracked as soon as the boiling water touched it, and it only seems to work well for spaghetti. I now use it to store my spaghetti in the cupboard.
There is a new thing out on tv for trimming dog and cat nails. It is basically a cheap Dremel tool. A number of my “dog owning friends” use their Dremel tools to trim the nails down. I don’t because my dogs are wimps either way! They hate the noise and feel of the Dremel tool as much as using a regular nail trimmer!!!
My wife bought some of these once. I just forwarded this to her so she won’t buy any more.
Somewhere along the line, I think the rules for advertising changed from “it has to work” to “it’s not allowed to make people sick/dead.” This has greatly increased the amount of junk products for sale.
I love the tree analogy in the foot pads ad. A second grader can tell you that their version of how a tree works is the exact opposite of reality.
Why is everyone selling special pasta cookers? Get a pot, add 1 gallon of water, boil, cook pasta, drain and enjoy.
Alcohol comes in powdered form now? I suddenly have all sorts of ideas for new snack chip flavors!
When I first saw those things on TV I assumed it was some low level electrolytic reaction. There is a way to etch metal with a couple of basic substances because the combination causes a low level electric current, enough to slightly etch metal overnight. It also turns the rag or pad used that icky brown color.
There is a similar scam to the foot pads called “aqua chi spa”. It is a foot bath that supposedly does the same type of toxin removal as the foot pads. The foot bath has a low level current in it and some “additives”. The bath water turns an icky green and brown, just like electro salt etching. Some reporter went to a spa or chiropractor that was selling this service, had them set up the spa but never put their feet in after the employee left the room. The water turned the same color sans feet.
I tried these pads a few months ago and got the green look on the bottom. My father swore by them and bought me some to try. Didn’t notice any effect.
Some of the pads are FDA approved but not all of them. I dont know if Kinoki is or not. The funny thing is, to get FDA approved you not only have to show safety but also show efficacy; meaning that your product works as intended.
The main ingredient in these pads is distilled bamboo vinegar. This is the substance that is supposed to absorb toxins through the bottom of your foot. Well, I have never heard of your body pushing toxins such as mercury and lead through ones skin. Other substances such as urea and other nitrogenous compounds go through your skin all day long, especially when one sweats. I guess it could be possible for something like mercury to go through, but there are some problems that it must overcome.
1) Urea is not charged and passes through the skin very easily. Mercury has different isotopes that are more common and if I remember correctly, have a charge, which makes it very difficult for it to pass through the skin.
2) There is no known mechanism as to how distilled bamboo vinegar extracts heavy metals from the body. I guess this isn’t much of a problem considering many of the Rx drugs we take have no known mechanism of action.
3) No real good studies showing that they work. This means, no evidence based studies with a population over 30 that is double blinded with a placebo with a solid design.
The theory is that your body takes all heavy metals in your body, and moves them to your feet to get the heavy metals away from your brain which is the most sensitive to them.
I’d like to see if these things work for people in liver and/or kidney failure. IF they work in them, then they MAY work in normal healthy people. But most likely they would probably only work, if at all, for people who have tons of toxins in them and not the average house mouse.
-Phex
-3rd Year PharmD / MBA Candidate
P.S. An interesting note, is that the FDA gave a warning on Jan 3 of 2008 to be careful of pharmaceuticals that are imported and even named a few brands of foot pads. I wonder if any of the ones they named, are ones that they approved in the US??? However, Kinoki has been under fire from the FDA since April.
P.S.S. I would also like to see if all the FDA approved pads have distilled bamboo vinegar in them, and if all the non approved ones don’t.
My old boss actually asked about these. Didn’t need to see anything beyond “continuity program” to know it was a scam, although at least Canino answered the “but is there any sort of legitimate science behind this” question. The pads don’t do anything? Quelle surprise…
@cinlouwho: I dremel my dog’s nails.. She hates it worse then the clippers. If I even pick up the dremel she runs for cover. If I leave the dremel out on the table she walks a wide path, glaring at the table to make sure the dremel doesn’t hop off the table and attack her.
Gotta read the fine print people:
“*Results only guaranteed for Sasquatches.”
Quick, get Tom Biscardi on the phone!
@Sudonum: I hope your “shock” is sarcastic.
Then why did they turn black after I attached them to my junk after that crazy night in Tijuana?
@Quietly: Just FYI, the address they list on the infomercial, in Howell NJ, is a few miles away from my house. It’s a UPS store. I swear. How can you trust a company that uses a UPS store as their business address?
@TideGuy: Did you happen to hook up with either Tila Tequila or New York?
Ancient Chinese Secret: The “As Seen On TV” logo is really code for “scam.”
No! Say it isn’t so! Somehow the whole idea of waking up in the morning with brown gunk coming from you feet and onto these pads did not give me the warm fuzzies. The body processes toxins from the body in other ways, yes, more in some than others, lol!
@Farquar: I dremel my foot callouses, best callous remover ever.