Let Logic Rule Dietary Decisions? Fat Chance!

I was fascinated with a recent piece in The Times Business section about a weight-reducing device called “Le Patch,” manufactured and marketed by a Laguna Hills company named New Source. It seems that the Federal Food and Drug Administration got a little huffy about both the advertising claims and the marketing procedures for Le Patch--which had not been approved by the FDA--and ordered the product removed from the market.

I wasn’t so much fascinated by the FDA action as by the product itself. According to the story, the manufacturers of Le Patch claimed that all we had to do was apply it to our skin and wait for the fat to fall away. The ultimate in the something-for-nothing theory.

I doubt if you could sell the Golden Gate Bridge to Southern Californians but offer a product that will restore youth or make us better looking and you can get away with murder--especially when you add to that mix the natural instinct of every human being to try to achieve some desirable end with the least amount of discomfort or energy investment.

The most basic kind of reason should tell us that applying a patch to our belly will not cut down our weight. The whole notion was so splendidly outrageous that I decided to call Le Patch’s creator to find out just how he justified these claims. His name is David Sterns and he wasn’t taking calls at the time of the FDA action, but he talked with me readily. He was a little melancholy about the fate of his product but still defended it stoutly.

He says New Source sold its interest in Le Patch last summer before it ever shipped a single product package because “bad publicity dictated that we not pursue it. We started out with great expectations of manufacturing a weight-loss patch that we felt would be exempt from FDA control. But there was such a proliferation of bogus patches with more and more excessive claims for what they would do that the FDA moved in and changed the regulations so that any patch designed or produced for any purpose other than covering a sore had to have FDA approval. Our position was always--and still is--that our patch was not a medicine but rather a mechanical device.”

Clearly Stern does not regard Le Patch as one of the bogus entries in this proliferating market. One major reason wasn’t mentioned in the original story. Turns out that Le Patch--a 30-day supply sold for $33.50--was packaged along with a diet regimen and an exercise program. When I asked Stern if it wasn’t the diet and exercise that produced the weight loss rather than the patch, he said that the three worked together and were of equal importance, adding that the patch would produce a weight loss even without the diet and exercise.

Stern seemed even more melancholy when I expressed some doubts about the efficacy of Le Patch. (I didn’t tell him that, in my view, any product named “Le Patch” has got to be suspect on the face of it.) But he seemed resigned to the existence of doubters. And besides, he no longer owns Le Patch.

I suppose when I called him I was secretly hoping he would convince me that it worked. I’m all for the theory of Le Patch. If I really believed I could get rid of this stomach I carry around with me by sticking a patch on it, I’d be the first in line. It’s the diet and exercise parts that don’t appeal to me. But Stern let me down. He didn’t really make a believer of me.

But I’m sure there are plenty of Californians--and I might be one of them--who would try this thing on the long chance that it might work just the way Stern says it will. For the same reason, we buy lottery tickets or soap that is shilled by movie stars. I only wish they’d come up with an arm patch that guarantees an Ivan Lendl backhand.