The Metabolife Story
"I Traveled The World
& Made Millions With Metabolife
You Have Heard Me
Tell The Story
Now Read the Story
For Yourself
Read The Whole Truth & Nothing But The Truth
As Told By
Michael J Ellis
Himself"
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Today
Isaac McLemore
"The 10 Million Dollar Man"
THE RAPE OF CINDERELLA
Former Metabolife CEO Michael Ellis Chronicles His Fight to Save the Miracle Weight-Loss Cure of Millions and the Fleecing of a Billion-Dollar Company
San Diego, CA - If the dramatic story of the rise and fall of Metabolife, the most popular herbal dietary supplement in American history, sounds like a work of glorified fiction, it isn’t. It all happened. And for the first time ever, Metabolife co-founder and former CEO Michael J. Ellis, who was just released from prison, is telling the whole story. In The Metabolife Story: The Rape of Cinderella, a compelling and painfully honest new book that reads like a Hollywood thriller, Ellis chronicles the astonishing rise of his weight-loss company from a single storefront to a billion dollars in sales, and describes in harrowing detail the company’s untimely demise at the hands of the Food and Drug Administration.
Metabolife was the weight-loss sensation that millions of Americans swore was the long-awaited, proven cure they had been looking for. But the company’s swift ascension drew the relentless scrutiny of the pharmaceutical giants whose own weight-loss products would suffer by comparison. Under intense pressure, the FDA, with the help of the Internal Revenue Service and several other government agencies, set out to take down Metabolife by any means necessary, ruthlessly harassing Ellis, his family and his employees, making outrageous accusations that ultimately proved false, destroying lives in the process, and even possibly contributing to the tragic suicide of one Metabolife executive, which is described in shocking detail in the book.
The culprit ingredient in Metabolife, according to the FDA, was the twelve milligrams of ephedra it contained. The agency claimed that ephedra was a danger to the public’s general health and banned it from all herbal products. Yet as Ellis writes in the book, the FDA has to this day left the very same supplement it called “highly dangerous” on the over-the-counter pharmaceutical market. In his book, Ellis recounts his vehement fight to save Metabolife and compel the FDA to tell the truth: that dozens of over-the-counter products still on the market today contain almost three times as much ephedra as Metabolife and that there was no reason to pull one of the most successful weight-loss aids in history out of the hands of Americans.
It was a fight that ultimately cost Ellis his marriage, his business and, almost, his life. In one of the book’s rawest passages, Ellis shares how he planned to take his own life and how, at the very last second, his love for his children prevented him from carrying through with his plan. Ellis eventually winded up in prison on charges that resulted from the FDA’s own lack of regulatory and reporting policy with regards to the herbal supplement industry. “The intense fight to save my company, and eventually my freedom, became an unparalleled education into the proven safety of ephedra and the FDA’s ability to bury any product or individual that conflicts with the interests of the giant pharmaceutical companies,” says Ellis. “The truth is that to this day ephedra is very prevalent in the over-the-counter pharmaceutical market, and that the American public has been successfully taking it for years with remarkably few adverse effects.”
The Metabolife Story: The Rape of Cinderella, which has already been the recipient of raves and generated interest from several A-list film producers, also details how Ellis created Metabolife, how he built the company with a unique, maverick grassroots marketing style, and how he rallied support from high-ranking elected government officials, law-enforcement agencies and leading experts in the health industry who still maintain their support of the safety of ephedra and Ellis’ innocence. Released from prison in February 2009,
“In its quest to dismantle Metabolife, the FDA became a willing pawn of the pharmaceutical industry,” Ellis continues. “Herbal supplements can be a huge part of health and wellness, so long as they are made available to the public with standardized and informative labels, warnings and reporting. Ultimately, Americans should have the right to control their own health, and I believe that after taking Metabolife out of the hands of millions who needed it, the FDA set out to cover up one of the biggest regulatory gaffes that it ever committed.”
