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Over the past month, a series of sponsored videos featuring Oprah Winfrey has been doing the rounds on Facebook. In the videos, the 68-year-old appears to be endorsing weight-loss gummies, a controversial product that is a well-known clickbait cliche.
The product promises to induce considerable weight loss within a mere three weeks. To give off the semblance of being legitimate and credible, the advertisements cleverly positioned a few clips of Oprah with a music overlay.
The videos harbor insinuations that the weight-loss gummies are a new brand launched by the celebrity herself. This fact-checking article investigates the credibility of this claim.
Are the Oprah Winfrey weight-loss gummies legitimate?
The caption of an April 27 Facebook post with over 120,000 views and 105 shares read:
"Grab Your Fitness-Gummy From Oprah! Just three weeks in, and she already melted off 100!"
The sponsored advertisements show a montage of a number of people popping bright-colored "vitamin" gummies with alleged weight-loss properties. They direct consumers to ingest one gummy before bed every day, discerning that the gummies are only meant for those over the age of 25.
Another video, posted on April 20, cleverly intersperses clips of Oprah Winfrey sourced from elsewhere between its exaggerated claims of dropping 100 pounds by ingesting the gummies.
These posts link to external websites where users can purchase the gummies for themselves.
One such site features a purported article from TIME Magazine that claims that the "weight loss miracle gummy" was a product that Oprah Winfrey launched in partnership with Weight Watchers. Other media outlets also ran articles reporting the supposed benefits of "Oprah's weight-loss gummies."
However, these advertisements are not legitimate and the alleged TIME article does not exist. A spokesperson for Oprah Winfrey confirmed that these Facebook posts were peddling a scam.
Nicole Nichols, Senior Vice President of Communications for Oprah, wrote in an email to USA Today:
"These ads are a complete fabrication. Oprah has nothing to do with this gummy product and does not endorse any such diet or weight-loss pill."
Although Oprah Winfrey has a demonstrated history of being an ambassador for the weight-loss journey, the actor is part of no such collaboration.
Oprah does indeed have a partnership with (and a stake in) WW International, formerly Weight Watchers, but the brand makes no mention of weight-loss gummies anywhere.
Nichols added that the philanthropist has never marketed weight-loss pills and has no plans to do so in the future. She further claimed that the videos used in the commercials were not authorized by Oprah.
This is not the first instance of Oprah's name being tied to scam weight-loss supplements. In early March, another host of Facebook posts advertised a weight-loss pill that Oprah had allegedly sworn was "a treadmill in a pill." One testimony of the "fully-natural solution" claimed that it helped them lose 62 pounds in the span of six weeks.
Both the weight-loss gummies and these weight-loss pills were not legitimate endorsements by Oprah.
