Athletic Greens - False Advertisiing

The skinny :

Athletic Greens lies in its advertising.  So how can we trust anything they say?

The fat :

I'd never heard of Athletic Greens before today.  They almost sound too good to be true, but hey, I'm always game to try something that might be good.

But it seemed dreadfully suspicious when I clicked through an affiliate link (from here) and saw a risk-free trial offer "Only Available To Selected Health 1st Readers".

What is this unique offer?

Simple - I sign up for an automatic monthly purchase of their product, and in return I get to pay nothing now for my first delivery.  I have some weeks to decide whether I like the product, and if I cancel my automatic monthly purchase within that timeframe, I don't pay for that first delivery either.

Good and fair.

A lot of businesses offer risk-free trial offers, and so they should.

So how good is the product?  It's purportedly good, but how do we know?

Our best info about the quality of what goes into Athletic Greens is Athletic Greens' own promotional material.  So we have to take it on trust.

And herein lies the problem.

They're liars.  And easily caught out too.

And they might dismiss it with "oh, but that's not a big lie" or "oh, but we do tell the truth about the quality of our product" or perhaps even "oh, but everyone lies a little bit in their sales" (the which is not actually the case), but it all boils down to the same thing : if someone is caught out lying, and then insists that they won't lie again, how do you know that that itself isn't already another lie?

So to test the truthfulness of their claim that this risk-free trial truly was only available to selected Health 1st readers, I Googled and found another Athletic Greens review which included another affiliate link.

I then opened that second affiliate link (from here) on a different computer on a different internet connection.

And here's what I found : a risk free offer, with no difference whatsoever that I could discern from the first one. (It was visually laid out differently, but the details of the offer seemed identical.)

So much for "only available to you special lucky S.O.B. who we're lying through our teeth to right now".

Hey, I don't care if they're selling arsenic or mercury or magic mushrooms or what, provided they tell the truth.  If someone wants to buy cannibis, and the seller discloses the cannibis content of a product, go ahead and buy & sell.  But when a seller resorts to lies to move their product, the foundation of trust is destroyed and the whole basis of the free market system is jeopardized.

Within this context then, it's a little disturbing to discover that Chris Ashenden is the guy behind Athletic Greens, and seems also to be the guy behind a rent-to-buy scheme that courts have ruled was done fraudulently.  Chris The Kiwi, he calls himself, and his page on the Athletic Greens website has mysteriously gone blank.  It's like they're trying to remove his name from association with the company.

So, is the guy a good guy?  I'm sure he thinks so.  I'm sure folk who know him think so.  And maybe even he is a good guy.

But when the very first and very most prominent communication from his business to you is a bold-faced lie - a promise of an exclusive special offer limited to a very special class of people, when actually they give it to everyone - it's hard to have confidence in any of the other claims by the company, including claims of product quality.  Yes, I'm sure it is a reasonably high quality product, but are they taking little shortcuts they're not telling us about?  Does it really taste as good as it does because of the listed ingredients in the promised ratios, or have they diddled with the formula a little, compromising the quality a tad so they'll sell more product because it tastes better?  Can we trust their claims?  And sadly, we cannot.

Which of their claims are truthful, and which are lies?  Again sadly, the only claim we could easily verify for ourselves was a lie.  So what else can we trust?  Without the time, tools, or inclination to spend a big chunk of my life independently auditing their claims, I'm left inclined to choose alternatives from brands that at least look like they're telling the truth.


When our best source of info on a product is the vendor, and the vendor lies, I'm not inclined to support them by giving them business.

There are other green superfoods out there, and lots of people say Athletic Greens is the best, and maybe so.

But my dollars are votes for ethical products and ethics starts with truth.

Exhibits :

Ooo!  Look how special I am!  I get a risk-free trial available to few others :

Oh - wait a mo, use Remote Desktop to another computer on another internet connection somewhere else in the world, and visit Athletic Greens via some other affiliate link, and note the fine-print :

 Hmmm.  So I get a free trial, with apparently identical characteristics, either way, but if I come in via the second affiliate, they don't make a big song & dance about the free trial offer, whereas via that first affiliate link, not only do they make song & dance, but bold-faced lie that somehow I'm super special to get this free trial offer!

Chris The Kiwi is Chris Ashenden - note he gives his last name when referencing his sister :

I guess it has something to do with this?


Note that the blank page appears to be in a WordPress section of their site, and if you invent non-existent urls there, you get the same blank page.  So it seems the page once existed and then was deleted out of WordPress on the Athletic Greens corporate site.  Want proof that the link did exist in the past?  Here 'tis :


UPDATE : Hmmm - I'm having issues with Google's Blogger.com platform choking on my many screenshots. Alas, if you require the screenshots to be convinced, I have them all here on my C: drive but can't get them into this blog post right now, and have other priorities I have to attend to now. But screenshots or no screenshots, the point still stands - this article really isn't about Athletic Greens, but about false advertising generally, and how companies should avoid it and how we "consumers" should vote for companies with ethics we want to see become more prevalent.