Summary of Action

TINA.org investigated Young Living Essential Oils, LC, a Utah-based multilevel marketing company that sells and markets essential oils, and found that it uses unsubstantiated, and therefore deceptive, health and disease-treatment claims to market its products. Such claims — made both expressly and implicitly — include representations that Young Living’s essential oils can treat or alleviate the symptoms of urinary tract infections, autism, PTSD, depression, epilepsy, insomnia, anxiety, strep throat, the flu, bronchitis, Alzheimer’s disease, and arthritis, to name a few.

TINA.org collected a sampling of more than 150 examples of such deceptive claims made by Young Living’s distributors, the vast majority of which were collected after TINA.org notified the company in November 2016 of precisely this deceptive marketing issue. (TINA.org initially investigated Young Living as part of its 2016 investigation of all DSA-member companies selling nutritional supplements.) These findings also come after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to Young Living admonishing it’s and its distributors’ use of disease-treatment claims to market its products, none of which are FDA-approved drugs.

As a result of these findings, TINA.org filed a complaint with the Direct-Selling Self Regulatory Council (DSSRC) on June 3, 2019 urging it to take action. On February 20, 2020, the DSSRC issued a decision stating that Young Living distributors had been making unsubstantiated health claims to sell products and recommended that the company cease using such claims.

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