 Hello, and welcome once again to The Randy's Show. I am Brian Thompson with the James Randy Educational Foundation, and with me as always is Mr. James Randy. Good to see you, Brian, and let's move right into our topic, which I think you may find provocative, but then I'm no one for introducing from time to time provocative subjects. Oh, I'm all for something provocative, so lay it on me. Okay, I can't find something rather peculiar the other day. I notice the strangest things, so as you know, Brian, I tend to notice these things. This will be a bit of a surprise to you, but this is from Publix Supermarkets. Now, Publix PUBLIX is very well known in Florida. I don't know about the rest of the United States, but I'm sure there are other venues as well. You have any where you are, as a matter of fact, do you know? I'm not sure, but I know whenever I go to Atlanta, there's one basically every four or five feet. Well, Publix is pervasive like that, yes, and provocative at the same time because this is a brand of clear fiber supplement. Now, this is something I take medically. It's a fiber supplement. It's not one of those laxative things. This just does things for my various parts of my body. Let's not get into the details of it, but it's a very simple thing, and they say it's soluble. That's wrong. It's mixable. It's not a soluble substance at all, but it is very finely divided. What is it? Actually, do they say what it is here? Well, it's sugar-free and flavor-free, taste-free, but it's not free when you buy it. No, the point is this is the container. It says it's 8.6 ounces and it's sold by weight, but this will be a bit of a revelation to you. Well, perhaps not. What they say that when it's manufactured, that it's rather bulked up, you see, because of the way it's produced, and so it takes a while to settle. I can't imagine that it takes this long to settle. Take a look at this. You see this green line that I put on here? That green line marks the level inside this bottle of the actual substance. The substance when you take the lid off and you take the seal off. Now, mind you, it's opaque, you notice. It's white opaque. It's not transparent. If this were transparent, they would never sell a container of it, because it's just below this little green mark that you see around here. This I put a piece of tape on in order to mark it indelibly for you. This is the level of what's actually in this container. Now, that doesn't mean they're spindling us. If it's sold by the ounce, by weight and such, that's just fine. But I really think that's very seductive and deceptive on the part of the packages. I think this should come to the attention of the FDA or somebody, if they had any person know that would look after this sort of thing or have any interest in it whatsoever. But this is a deceptive feature. I've written to Publix about it, and I get no response whatsoever. They just don't answer. They ignore it altogether. It gets filed in what they call the circular filing cabinet, waste paper basket, I'm sure. But I think this is something that more people should pay a little bit of attention to. You see an opaque container like this? Wonder just how much of this? See that could be this height right here very easily, and it would be quite adequate to contain the contents. It doesn't take that long for it to settle out. Maybe when it's manufactured, it's this full. But I'm sure that settles out rather quickly and maybe just a quick like that on a table would settle it out. You know, I always get a little bit annoyed whenever I open a bag of potato chips and it's half empty. And then later on I'm grateful for it because I would eat the whole thing. Well, I'm sure over the years you've dealt with a lot of manufacturers of pseudoscientific bunk like, you know, biopathic remedies and things like that. And they seem to always sort of skirt the line between lying and deceiving in their packaging. So what can you say about the way that, you know, regulatory bodies like the FDA and the FTC deal with deception versus outright lying? Well, I've been preparing the text for a magician in the laboratory as you know, rather frantically. I'm coming along very well with it. Thank you. And the book should go to the publishers I think within the next 60 days. But I find out that the FDA just doesn't have staff. They don't have people there who can look after this kind of thing. They have no interest in it whatsoever because they're swamped. Now, this is not unlike some other government agencies as well. But I would think that the FDA might get some sort of priority at treatment. I think the FDA needs to look into these things as they need to look into homeopathic remedies, so-called, I use that word in quotations all the time, of course. I think they need some additional help. They need someone to supervise what they're doing and provide them with adequate personnel. They just don't have it. The same with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Washington. They don't have enough people either. So they're issuing patents on perpetual motion machines and free energy machines left and right because they just don't have the staff to filter these things out. Now you would think that perpetual motion machines, as an automatic classification, would be classified as fake, don't work. They simply cannot work. The laws of physics won't allow them to work. But the deluded out there, the great deluded inventors who sell these things all the time, and they sell stock in them, and some of them get very, very wealthy, like the Stern company, S-T-E-O-R-N company. And I think that's Denmark or is it Sweden? I think Sweden. They have been selling this device for the longest time and promising demonstrations of it. And I've watched the demonstrations on TV, and the wheel turns around like crazy, and then they get a cab, and they stop. So they look and they say, oh, what happened? It stopped Dumbo because this sort of thing will not work. But they seem to think that it will work, and they promise demonstrations. They call, well, tune in in 48 hours, we'll have it working. Dah. This is something that they can get away with because there just aren't enough folks out there to monitor this kind of thing and relieve people of their delusions that are perhaps even shared by the inventors. So I guess the lesson here is for everybody before you buy anything, do your research, make sure it works, make sure it's not woo, and also make sure that that package is full. I guess the only way to do that though is to open things up in the store peek inside. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I intend to take this back to Publix and show them the level at which their particular brand of this digestible fiber is set. Maybe I can get an argument. Maybe after this podcast, someone at Publix will pay it. No, I don't think so. Probably not. But you can update us in a future episode. Of course. The Randy Show is a production of the James Randy Educational Foundation. To learn more about how we promote science and critical thinking, go to randy.org.