With food supplement peddling, what comes around goes around. Apparently, this has been going on for ages.
Nutri-Bio was a multi-level marketing scheme in the 1960s and 1970s started by Chuck Young, a Californian who moved to Vancouver, BC.
Talented but troubled actor, health food advocate, and occasional methamphetamine user Bob Cummings was the star attraction. A photo of his beaming face was even displayed in the Vancouver headquarters.
Said Cummings to a group of Nutri-Bio distributors, “NutriBio is not a business. It’s a way of life.”
The U.S. branch of Nutri-Bio supposedly grossed $30 million per year in 1962.
One Nutri-Bio executive even hazarded the idea that food supplements might curb violent behavior, saying that
If you deprive a bunch of laboratory rats of calcium they become vicious and attack each other. Restore calcium to their diet and they calm down. There was the story in the newspapers a few years ago about the young lad who killed eleven people for no apparent reason. That report included a powerful message. The boy hadn’t had a home-cooked meal for two years; he had lived on hot dogs and cokes.
MacLean’s, The Rosy World of Nutri-Bio
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t look too kindly on Nutri-Bio, often seizing shipments of the tablets and powders, as they were “falsely promoted as cures for ailments ranging from heart trouble to impotency,” according to The Greenville News, November 30, 1961.
Nobody really knew what was in Nutri-Bio products, but that was never the point.
The point, as in all MLM schemes, was in selling the concept to the next person and working your way up the pyramid.
