By Shane Potter (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: February 1, 2012
Life got you down? Feeling like you have no energy? Need more strength?
The UFV bookstore has a product for you. It’s called the Edge Advantage bracelet and it uses the power of negative ions to possibly bring you many health benefits.
Sound like a scam? It is.
The whole concept is built upon the idea that negative ions make us feel good while positive ions make us feel bad. Keep in mind that an ion, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is merely “any individual atom, molecule, or group having a net electric charge (either positive or negative)”.
Edge Advantage bracelets are one of the many companies that make negative ion-producing bracelets similar to Power Balance, a brand which also produced wristbands advertising health benefits. To promote their company, they stuck their bracelets on many top athletes around the world; soon people everywhere were wearing them. In the apex of the Power Balance craze, the company could sell a pad of ten individual holographic stickers advertised to have the same health benefits — for $100. Seriously.
Since Power Balance’s advertised claims that the bracelets were able to improve your strength, balance, and flexibility were unfounded, the company fell into legal trouble and was forced to admit that the wristbands had no creditable scientific evidence proving that they had any effect at all. After lawsuits, criticism, and legal battles from sponsored athletes and independent studies the company was forced to file for bankruptcy in November 2011.
Sadly, this was not the end of the wristband craze. The temptation to take a cheap rubber band, put a holographic sticker on it, make it “negatively ionized,” and sell it for $20 or $30 each was too great. In the wake of Power Balance’s bankruptcy, hundreds of copycat companies popped up that had magically found their own way of “ionizing” wristbands to produce the same amazing health benefits. These copycat companies, however, unlike Power Balance, found loopholes in their sales tactics to make sure they didn’t get sued. The Edge Advantage guys, for instance, as well as many companies like them, make sure they add the words “may” or “could” to any claim they make.
If you go to the UFV book store in Abbotsford you can see the Edge Advantage bracelets and informational propaganda telling people what they do. The Edge advantage bracelet claims to be “embedded with innovative negative and scalar energy technology.” The company states that the product “may promote many health benefits such as improved balance, improved strength, improved flexibility, helps provide resistance to infection/bacteria, works with immune/endocrine systems, helps destroy virus/bacteria, helps detoxify, helps increase energy, helps protect DNA from damage, helps slow the aging process.”
Let me put this in perspective. This is the University of the Fraser Valley, not some kiosk at the mall. We are supposed to be intelligent academic minds who will go on to be the doctors, lawyers, and teachers of the next generation. What am I supposed to think when I see students buying a product that claims to help “protect DNA from damage” with “negative and scalar energy technology”? Better yet, why are we being sold a product like this at a university book store, a place we trust?
Is this a joke?
Let me make this clear: It’s a placebo!
It’s drawing on our lack of understanding of science. That’s it.
The company even admits on their website that they “make no claims to the science and technology behind the bracelet.”
If you tell yourself that your favourite shirt will give you more energy or help you win the big game, any effect it has, it’s not because it’s infused with negative ions or holographic stickers. It’s because the mind is a powerful thing.
And — suspending reality for a moment — if one brand of bracelet really did work, how can we validate it? Who tests and regulates these? Am I supposed to believe that any unscientifically educated entrepreneur can throw up their own company like Edge Advantage and know how to make products that protect DNA from damage or slow the ageing process?
Maybe I should make my own bracelet. It’s still in the design process but I’m sure it’ll have too many health benefits to count.
