Caveat emptor, bloody hell.

Many years ago, a product called The Abtronic hit the Canadian market to fairly widespread joy. Strapped around your waist while you sat placidly watching television or reading, the machine would send electrical stimuli into your abdominal muscles, causing them to tense and relax and tense and relax and tense and releax. “The benefits of crunches without the exertion!” promised ab-chiseled men and women in lycra.

I know several people who bought one of these devices (so no judgment, if you were one of them), managing to override their usual “too good to be true skepticism” in the hopes of steely abs without that queasy ache of 300 nightly crunches. Then the class-action lawsuits started appearing, people claiming that they had used the product exactly as specified and nothing was happening, nary an eight-pack in sight.

Eventually the makers of The Abtronic were forced to knuckle under Canada’s rather stringent truth in advertising laws, admitting publicly that, as abdominal muscles are in constant movement through breathing, talking and laughing, a simple muscle tense without resistance would have no effect on muscle tone. The hammer fell and everyone who bought the Abtronic had their money dutifully refunded.

And so a lesson was re-learned: come on people, if it seems too good to be true, then really, seriously, we mean it, believe us, it probably is.

I really support truth in advertising laws. While I consider myself a relatively savvy consumer (What’s that, screaming consumer debt? Yeah, yeah, I hear you.), it’s comforting to know that advertisers must temper their marketing slogans with some semblance of reality. We’re still not protected from the barrage of liminal and subliminal messages, mind: it remains up to us to realize that Dove’s noble pro-female self-esteem advertising campaigns are made by the same people as those utterly offensive and rabidly sexist Axe bodyspray ads, and that, ultimately, the purpose of both is just to sell more products. It’s more like buyer be informed, more than buyer beware.

Enter Mexico, oh Mexico. It does not appear that Mexico has truth in advertising laws to protect the good people from their own blind trust and optimistic hopes (and, let’s face it, laziness, because what else drives the desire for a machine that creates rock-hard abs without more exertion than required to raise the next salt and vinegar chip to your mouth?).

I present, for your reading pleasure, three examples of this blatant disregard for truth, all of which fall in that most predatory of categories: weight loss.

First, we have the Slender Shaper: a belt, much like the Abtronic except capable of strapping onto any of your problem areas, that shakes your jiggles around until they magically disappear. Now, anyone who’s seen the television footage from the 1950s with those wiggly belt machines, and who’s noticed that those wiggly belt machines can no longer be found in gyms and spas, might suspect that the mere act of wiggling is not productive. Oh, but no! promises the cheery (male) voice-over, splicing an image of a woman with the Slender Shaper at work on her hip/rear area with the image of a slim, taut woman doing the salsa. The argument: Slender Shaper will not only give you the slim, taut body of a regular salsa dancer but it will do it faster because the machine makes you jiggle 20 times as fast as dancing! WOW.

Second, we have a machine that I’ve forgotten the name of so we’ll call it the Heat Slimmer: another belt, but this one producing heat instead of jiggling, and, again, recalling weight loss machines of the 50s that are no longer around anymore for suspicious reasons. But oh no! promises the cheery (male) voice-over, and they’ll prove it: they place a fair-sized pat of butter on top of the heating pad and exclaim delightedly as it melts away. So, too, will *your* fat! WOW!

Third, and finally, we have The Patch (again, I’ve forgotten the real name): it is, quite simply, a patch. Weary woman in black and white, attempting to jog awkwardly, collapses against a tree with her hand on her heaving side. Weary woman in black and white, on the verge of frustrated tears, swipes a pile of diet pill containers off her kitchen table with one arm swoop. Weary woman in black and white is fed up with machines that don’t work. And then! Weary woman in colour, slaps a little white three-inch squared white patch on her curvy rear end. Animation in colour (voice-over by cheery male) shows us how the patch sends little – what? they never do say – in through the skin, the little green arrows of whatever it is breaking up the fat cells just like that, *snap*. Skinny woman that bears absolutely no resemblance to weary woman looks in mirror and marvels at the fit of her skinny jeans, all thanks to the patch of wonder. WOW!!

(On a sidenote, isn’t it amusing how the Before people in these ads are always so helpless? They have a folding table up for sale here – just a simple white dealie – and the black and white Before people are fumbling, dropping things, sighing and wringing their hands as if a normal folding table is Just So Difficult. Poor sods.)

Well, that’s three, but let me throw one eye-roller in that doesn’t involve weight loss: a plastic, battery-powered portable light bulb that you can take around the house in case of a blackout (a fairly regular occurrence in a city of 22 power-draining souls). One of its selling features: it doesn’t use electricity! WOW. Except… um… the batteries?

No, I can’t stop, one more, and back to weight loss: chubby, unloveable woman uses some Ask Your Doctor product and manages to drop all that pesky unwanted weight. Suddenly she has a handsome husband and kids, and, apparently, based on the slow-motion hand-in-hand running with dashing man, access to a beach and some designer clothes. Because what would YOU do with a few pounds less?

Okay, that last one is not unique to Mexico, admittedly. Being made to feel as if your particular brand of floor cleaner is standing in the way of your finding a husband/proof that you are a bad mother/threatening your very existence by not killing every single germ known to man is a pretty common ploy. No one is ever going to be able to look me in the eye and defend advertising as anything other than a bunch of people trying to sell a product by any means necessary, but all this blatant misrepresentation – no! worse! outright lying! - just… well… it’s pretty hilarious.

Pity those poor souls who actually think, “Wow! Look at that butter! My fat cells and bovine milk products are EXACTLY the same thing! Where is my chequebook?”