Castle Personal Training
Castle Personal Training is a Corstorphine, Edinburgh based company who specialise in weightloss/toning and Pre and Post Natal exercise.
Blog 26-03-13 Your Herbalife PT doesn’t care about you
Hi guys,
Just a very quick one today, I keep bumping into more and more Personal Trainers who think it’s acceptable to sell Herbalife to their clients and more and more people who are pressured into buying into the Herbalife scam.
It’s very simple; If your PT sells you Herbalife products he does not care about you and is only after filling his own wallet.
A quick example of the typical Herbalife product; Instant Herbal beverage with tea extracts.
Just a typical Herbalife product.
It’s difficult to find prices for Herbalife products but I have managed to find the following for this;
In Australia this goes for $55 per 100g. (Source)
In America this sells for $83 per 100g (Source)
In the UK, through one of the major gym-chains, you can buy this for £18 per 100g.
Now let’s have a look at the ingredients and see if it’s worth even the £18 charged by people at the gyms in the UK.
An ingredients list can be found here (Big 2.6Mb PDF File) but let me list the main ones;
Maltodextrin; A tasty highly processed additive that’s being added to loads of processed foods.
Fructose Powder; In other words, sugar.
Green tea extract; So Green tea. Not magic superhuman tea, just normal green tea.
Natural caffeine powder; In other words, caffeine…which you also find in normal tea but they have added a bit more than you find in normal tea.
Those are the main ingredients, the rest of the stuff they claim is very good for you makes up less than 0.5% of the ingredients
So, other than the highly processed Maltodextrin which acts as a sweetener, you have green tea with sugar and added caffeine.
1 serving is approx 1.7 grams, according to Herbalife, so you get 60’ish cups of tea with sugar (and chemicals) for £18.
M&S makes expensive tea, we all know they are quite pricey. Now let’s buy their tea through an online “world-wide shipping” company who sell “britfoods abroad”. In other words, let’s find a way to really pay over the odds for tea.
Per 20 bags you would pay £2.41 (Source). So we multiply this by 3 and we pay £7.23 for 60 bags. Add a kilogram of M&S sugar to this (from the same website) for which we’d pay £2.17 and we pay £9.40 for 60 cups of tea with sugar, but without the artificial sweeteners.
I think you’ll agree that I have been quite fair in my comparison. I for one, definitely don’t pay £2.17 for a kilogram of sugar and pay a hell of a lot less for my tea.
So even though we went as expensive as possible we only spent half of the price that Herbalife charges for the same amount of tea and sugar. So why would you pay anymore?
I had a chat with a Personal Trainer earlier this week and he said “But I only sell Herbalife meal replacements (MRPs) and then only to people who have very bad eating habits and having a meal replacement is better than having a Macdonalds”. This sounds fair enough, until you realise that the Herbalife MRPs cost up to 10x more than other available MRPs (Available online through websites such as myprotein.com and bodybuilding.com.) so the only reason he really sells it is because he gets £6 per MRP box he sells. If your personal trainer cared about your eating habits and helping you out by suggesting you take a Meal Replacement Product he would give you the link to one of the above sites and not try to sell Herbalife to you.
Really, as soon as a personal trainer tries to sell Herbalife to you you should tell them to go away and probably try to find a different personal trainer. After all, if they are trying to flog you expensive products that you don’t need how can you be sure they don’t give you slightly worse training in an effort to keep you around for longer?
Dump them, fast..it’s the only thing to do.
Take care,
Your friend,
Peter
P.S. I don’t recommend any of the above websites to you. I wouldn’t recommend supplementation without knowing you and have never purchased anything from Britishsupermarketworldwide.com or any such websites as it’s a silly way to buy tea 🙂
Castle Personal Training 
Herbalife sugar is mainly fructose. Fructose has a GI rating of 19. Below 55 is low slow release). Table sugar (glucose) has a GI of 100 (high) Even brown rice has a GI of 55, so higher than the sugar in herbalife.
Different sugars have different effects on the body, do you not think a multi-billion pound company know this???
And no I don’t sell the products it as I run a fitness company (conflict of interest), but I do use the products along with other companies.
Sorry to shoot you down but you can’t speak for every PT out there who recommends herbalife, and the ingredients are alot more thought out than the impression you’re giving.
This is typical view point of somebody looking in from the outside and slagging it off without real knowledge
I love the above comment for many, many reasons but the main one is the “Fructose is OK because it has a low GI” argument.
This is so massively flawed it is simply unreal. The low GI only holds for slow release of energy..it says nothing about the health impacts of the stuff. Slow release of energy does not equal healthy.
Here are some studies that prove that fructose comes with it’s own set of problems.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=(“uric acid”[MeSH Terms] OR (“uric”[All Fields] AND “acid”[All Fields]) OR “uric acid”[All Fields]) AND ((“fruit”[MeSH Terms] OR “fruit”[All Fields]) OR (“fructose”[MeSH Terms] OR “fructose”[All Fields]))&cmd=DetailsSearch
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-fructose-bad-for-you-201104262425
“Do you not think a billion pound company knows this?” What a strange question to ask. Yes, I do think they know what the GI of fructose is. I also think Coca Cola knows what their product contains. I just think they are more interested in selling their wares than they are in anything else. That’s how they got to be a billion pound company, after all.
Also the main point about my article was not that the Herbalife stuff is bad for you but that it’s massively over-priced and that most people selling it are more interested in money than they are in giving you something cost-effective that works..or educating you about real food.
With regards to your final comment “somebody looking in from the outside”, that’s just hilarious. What “inside” is there? Using or selling the stuff is the only inside there is..and I’ll pass on that as there are NO health benefits to using the stuff compared to a normal healthy diet and that really isn’t that hard to substantiate if you know how to read ingredients on a bottle correctly.
Three part video analysis of Herbalife products.
Alan Aragon’s Facebook post on MLM nutrition companies.
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I totally agree with this. I’m a personal trainer. I do not endorse Herbalife. I also have been informed by people in the business that they run the Fitclub bootcamps without and formal qualification as a personal trainer.
Yeah, they basically do whatever they want. Unfortunately there are tonnes of ways for unqualified people to run bootcamps, or even do PT. Personal trainer is not a protected term in a lot of countries, neither is “life-style coach” or “Nutrition expert”. You just need to have had a carrot once in your life and you can call yourself a nutritional expert in the UK, scary really as the public doesn’t know any better.
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As a qualified personal trainer, it makes me angry that Herbalife distributors are passing themselves off as qualified in nutrition and even exercise. They are running free bootcamps with the sole objective of peddling their poor quality supplements. Many of these people have no qualifications or formal training in prescribing fitness programs. They are a danger to people’s health. They are also often not paying council fees to use local parks and many are not insured. They are often not registered with governing bodies such as they have to be qualified to do so. A warning to the public, stay clear of these people and if you are going to pay them for goods and services, then at least ask to see their qualifications. Otherwise report them to local councils, the fitness industry governing body and consumer protection groups.
Couldn’t agree with you more David. I’ve seen some of your stuff on FB and we’re pretty much in line on the whole Herbalife thing.
It’s a plague in our industry and the sooner Personal Trainers realise that they are doing more harm to their reputation than good, the better.
Great site. A lot of helpful information here. I’m sending it to a few friends
ans also sharing in delicious. And naturally, thanks
in your sweat!
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Thanx for all these helpful informations
Well the USFDA allows preservatives too. And fillers. Lets be real there are fillers in your store bought protein mixes as well.
I have done herbalife myself and it has kept me from being diabetic. And helped with inflammatory issues that Doctors couldn’t do. I have had more issues eating the foods allowed by the USFDA and with this product none. Actually some doctors are all about Herbalife. I know a woman has an actual degree in nutrition from MSU and she hates that she has to tell her clients the wrong information with the food we have to eat these days. She is on Herbalife herself. I don’t sell Herbalife at this moment. I just enjoy it. So what cares who I am buying it from makes money? You go to McDonalds order food then you pay for it correct and that franchise owner gets paid right? And the grocery store owner that you shop takes money from your wallet too? I guess I don’t see your arguement here. Everyone makes money off people everyday.
I’m not surprised that you pretend not to see the argument here, that’s a classics Herbalife sales technique. You’ve answered a lot of things in your post but not the actual point of the article; Herbalife is a ripoff and much more expensive than anything else out there z