AromaTrim

The creators of the AromaTrim infomercial really, really want to convince you that sniffing a piece of plastic is a great way to shed pounds. And they think the best way to prove it is to ambush unsuspecting people with food and then mock them for their lack of faith in AromaTrim. Veteran infomercial hostess Forbes Riley and Geoffrey Scott (who looks like a discount James Garner) prowl the “Third Street Promenade” in Santa Monica and tempt random pedestrians with offers of junk food like brownies, French fries, and ice cream.

They, for example, wave a large cookie in front of one woman and ask her if she’d like to eat it. Like all the others, she answers yes and blithely denies that anything could assuage her hunger. The hosts then tell her to shove the cookie in her mouth and stick AromaTrim under her nose. Suddenly, her countenance falls, her eyes glaze over, her mouth stops. Sensing their triumph, the hosts gleefully taunt their volunteer: “Keep chewing. Keep enjoying that cookie you love so much. You could eat three or four of these.” All these impromptu demonstrations supposedly prove that AromaTrim works; the possibility that looking like a fool in public is causing these people to lose their appetites is never considered.

But this infomercial doesn’t rely on these demonstrations alone to convince viewers that AromaTrim “literally puts the power of weight loss in the palm of your hand.” They cite the authority of organizations with pompous names like Aroma Therapy Research Institute and Nutrition Research Clinic. One expert, clad in a white lab coat, is redundantly identified as “Dr. John Foreyt, Ph.D,” just in case anyone missed his credential the first time. All the studies by the men at these institutes have uncovered the fact that people eat because they are want food—something that apparently no one had ever thought of before. This desire for food resides in the brain’s “Limbic System.” A whiff of AromaTrim works by altering the messages in this system. So the solution to your weight problem is to use your nose to “totally reprogram your mind.” They insist all this is safe. However, immediately after using AromaTrim, one woman starts unconsciously speaking in a foreign tongue and it takes several seconds for her to realize what she’s doing.

AromaTrim’s experts classify a desire to eat a specific food as a “craving” and a vague desire to eat any food as “hunger.” And they insist that these impulses are so different as to require two different products to eradicate them, each with its own blend of herbs that scramble brain signals in just the right way. Everyone in this infomercial is adamant that only the special blend of herbs in AromaTrim will succeed in making you lose your appetite and that “a piece of old Limburger cheese or a sock, that wouldn’t do it”—just in case you were thinking of using this infomercial’s scientific knowledge on your own without forking over the $49.95.

For those who doubt that “90% of taste is smell,” they invite a man in the studio audience to put on a blindfold, pinch his nose, and taste three different foods. He swallows applesauce, ketchup, and mustard. As soon as he puts the ketchup and mustard in his mouth, the studio audience, for some mysterious reason, starts laughing and cringing, as if he were being fed something exotic, like horseradish or turpentine. In any event, the man is unable to identify what he ate and is mildly surprised when he finds out. On-screen graphics invite die-hard skeptics to “Try This at Home!”

Your $49.95 gets you not only AromaTrim’s “Crave Ender” and “Suppress” but also an instructional video. Do you need and entire videotape to instruct you to sniff a piece of plastic when you’re hungry? Maybe the tape teaches you how to cope after the messages in your brain have been altered. Or perhaps it tells you how not to look like a buffoon in public while jamming AromaTrim against your nostrils and taking a big ol’ whiff.