Healthilife? I don’t think so.

On Monday, Alex came home from school more excited than normal. I mean, she usually tries to “scare” me at the gate, and runs around like a kid with too much sugar in her (eeek!) until she finally has a shower and calms down. I think the joy of being out of school and being home alone with Mommy is enough to make her nutty. But, as I said, Monday was different. She comes in all excited, and tells me she’s going to be cured!

Okay, good thing I was sitting down, because news like this is not something you want to learn standing up. Apparently, a guy at the school came in to push his company’s new product, Healthlife. Now, we’ve seen the commercials on television – a bunch of happy laughing kids who rush to get their Healthilife juice box. No marketing novices, these guys, the commercials run during all of the cartoons.

So Alex shows me this purple box of Tropical flavored Healthilife juice. And she starts…

Alex: Mom, I bought this at school. The guy says it's good for all diseases.

Me: Alex, he’s a salesman. He wants you to buy his juice. That’s all. It’s simply juice.

Alex: No, mom. It’s going to cure me. The guy said if has no sugar in it, and if you’re sick with malaria or any disease you are going to be cured! So, can I drink it? Can I drink it, please, huh? Please?!!!

Me: Let me see the box.

Hmmm. My opinion: It’s a stupid juice box. Ingredients: Water, Fruit Juices… oh and here’s the magic ingredient – GLUCOSE!! Reading a little bit more, let’s see, for every 100 ml there’s 12 carbohydrates. Okay, this box is 250 ml, so that’s 30 carbs for a single little juice box! Alex would need 1.25 units of Humalog just to drink this. “No sugar added,” my ass. What they mean is no extra sugar added. Yeah, these guys learned from the marketing masters, alright. Didn’t they used to do that in the states until consumers got savvy?

But Alex is an 8 year old girl. And the premise (promise?) is just what an 8 year old girl with Type 1 diabetes wants to hear: That she will be cured if she drinks this.

Mom has to play the bad guy, once again. Alex learns she’s been duped out of 65 pesawas for a juice box that’s no different than any other – except for the price, that is. Similar juice boxes sell for 30 or 40 pesawas.

When the boys come home, I ask them about the salesman. They confirm that this guy had a whole crowd of kids around him and he was pitching the benefits of this drink over any other. According to Mike (who did this amazingly funny impersonation), “If ‘dis guy over here drinks Healthilife and ‘dat guy over ‘dere drinks “someting” (sic) else, and ‘dey have a race, ‘den ‘dis Healthilife boy, he’s gonna win dat race every single time. He gonna go very fast because of ‘da glucose.”

Funny or not, if I had been at that school listening to that crap, I’d have chewed this guy a new one. Telling our kids that this drink is good for malaria and all other diseases is simply outrageous. How many kids bought that “no added sugar” diatribe as gospel, not understanding that it wasn’t the same as “sugar-free.” Too many kids, I’ll wager. According to Mike, pretty much everyone bought a juice box, and they’re now being sold at the canteen. That's great. Just wait till next year when the Ministry of Health reports that incidents of Type 2 diabetes in children has increased in Ghana, now that all of our kids are being tricked into drinking this "no sugar added" drink under the delusion that it's healthy.

Sean told me that some of his classmates will chastise him for buying a 7-Up (saying, of course, you're going to get diabetes like your sister -- and yes, Sean does try to explain the difference between Type 1 and Type 2) – meanwhile they’re drinking a Healthilife juice box with the same amount of sugar in it. I asked Sean why they’d even allow this guy to come to the school to sell this product. He said, “Mom, this is Ghana. It’s bribery. He paid someone so he could sell that at school.” How sad that my 13 year old is so cynical. But worse, that he’s also correct.

And how devastating and evil is it to dash the hopes of an 8 year old girl who only wants a cure and is tricked into believing that she’ll find it in a juice box?