What was claimed
The FDA has approved herbal nasal sprays for weight loss and liver disease treatment.
Our verdict
The FDA has not approved any such devices.
Facebook posts contain false claims about FDA product approval
A number of Facebook posts claim a “nasal herbal box” has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to improve liver health and aid weight loss. Full Fact has confirmed with the regulator that this is not true.
False information about health and medications can cause harm, especially if people use it to make decisions about their treatment. We have written many times regarding false claims about alternative treatments for disease and about conventional medications.
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What the videos say
The Facebook posts contain two videos which have very similar claims, and between them have been watched and liked thousands of times.
They claim that a box, which appears to be some kind of inhaler, will stimulate weight loss and enhance liver health.
Captions in the first video say: “This revolutionary device made by Japanese engineers has been approved by FDA. That can make any woman or man loose between 12 to 16 pounds a week. [...] It attacks some body cells that are responsible for weight loss and makes it easy to loose weight. [...] Also, it kills toxic cells, increases metabolism, and increases your libido. It also detoxifies and improved your liver health. [sic]”
The second video says: “This cleansing nasal herbal box will make you lose between 12 and 15 pounds per week [...] After 1 year of researching by the US government, finally it gets the agreement to be sold in the United States.”
It goes on to make the same claims about detoxification and boosting metabolism “so when you lose weight you keep it off forever”.
In fact, the FDA told us by email that it “has not authorized any nasal herbal inhaler devices for weight loss or to improve liver function.”
We have contacted both accounts that posted the videos, but received no response at the time of writing.
Featured image courtesy of Petr Kratochvil
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the products in the posts are not FDA approved.