Trade Group’s Lawsuit Against ‘Dr. Oz’ is Dismissed

Summary

The law­suit filed by the NAOOA against Dr. Oz for crit­i­ciz­ing imported olive oils has been dis­missed by a Georgia court. The judge ruled that the show did not dis­par­age imported olive oil or label it as a health haz­ard, and the NAOOA is con­sid­er­ing appeal­ing the deci­sion.

The law­suit filed in Georgia by the trade group that rep­re­sents the largest American importers and bot­tlers that chal­lenged tele­vi­sion’s Dr. Oz on what it called ​“false attacks” that sin­gled out imported olive oils, has been dis­missed, the show said today.

Oz was sued by the North American Olive Oil Association (NAOOA) for claim­ing dur­ing a show that aired last May that 80 per­cent of the extra vir­gin olive oil sold in U. S. super­mar­kets isn’t ​“real.”

The NAOOA claimed that the inci­dence of mis­la­bel­ing is much lower and argued in court that it was only 2 per­cent.

Fulton County Superior Court (Georgia) judge Alford J. Dempsey, Jr. said that the Court was ​“not con­vinced” that the show dis­par­aged imported olive oil or falsely labeled it a ​“health haz­ard” as the suit alleged.

“Dr. Oz goes so far as to encour­age his audi­ence mem­bers to sam­ple some of the olive oils being taste-tested on the show, which the Court must pre­sume he would not do if the gist of the show was that the olive oils on American shelves were a health haz­ard,” the judge said.

Dempsey fur­ther deter­mined that the NAOOA did not estab­lish a case under the Georgia law pop­u­larly known as a Veggie Libel Statute. This is the same type of law that some cat­tle feed­ers in Texas unsuc­cess­fully used as the basis of a law­suit against Oprah Winfrey nearly 20 years ago.

Judge Dempsey expressed ​“grave con­cerns that the moti­va­tion for the present action falls directly within the pur­pose of the anti-SLAPP statute as an attempt to chill speech, in this case, in the com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place,” accord­ing to a press release issued by Oz.

“We’re dis­ap­pointed with the judge’s deci­sion which was not based on the under­ly­ing mer­its of our case but on tech­ni­cal­i­ties in the Georgia anti-SLAPP statute which pro­tect media defen­dants,” Eryn Balch, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the NAOOA told Olive Oil Times today in response to the deci­sion.

“Nothing in the deci­sion lends cre­dence to the unsub­stan­ti­ated attacks on olive oil made on The Dr. Oz seg­ment and we are eval­u­at­ing our options for appeal. Our goal was and remains to help con­sumers get the facts about heart-healthy olive oil, and we will con­tinue to explore every means at our dis­posal to cor­rect the record,” Balch said.

“For 25 years the NAOOA has used inde­pen­dent International Olive Council (IOC) labs to test hun­dreds of olive oils col­lected directly from super­mar­kets annu­ally and results con­sis­tently sup­port the find­ing that more than 98 per­cent of olive oil in U.S. retail out­lets is authen­tic,” she added.

“Rigorous, peer-reviewed sci­en­tific research has con­sis­tently shown that all types of olive oil have sig­nif­i­cant health ben­e­fits, includ­ing reduc­ing heart dis­ease,” Balch said when the suit was filed. ​“This case is par­tic­u­larly trou­bling because in many pre­vi­ous con­tro­ver­sies Dr. Oz has rec­om­mended prod­ucts with no proven ben­e­fits, but in this case, his false and care­less words have dis­cour­aged mil­lions of peo­ple from using a prod­uct with sci­en­tif­i­cally demon­strated advan­tages.”

Specifically, the NAOOA said, the prob­lems with Oz’s state­ments were:

• His 80 per­cent claim is patently false and com­pletely unsourced;
• He relies on a sub­jec­tive, taste-dri­ven sen­sory test when only a sci­en­tific chem­i­cal lab­o­ra­tory test can deter­mine if olive oil is pure; and
• Oz failed to dis­close that his ​“expert,” Maia Hirschbein, was on the pay­roll of California Olive Ranch, which has a finan­cial inter­est in pro­mot­ing California olive oil and dis­parag­ing olive oil orig­i­nat­ing out­side the state.

Amy Chiaro, the exec­u­tive pro­ducer of The Dr. Oz Show said, ​“We are thrilled to be vin­di­cated in this law­suit and will con­tinue to inves­ti­gate and speak the truth about the impor­tance of proper label­ing on the foods we eat.”

In 2013, Oz told view­ers to test the qual­ity of their olive oil by putting it in the refrig­er­a­tor to see if it con­gealed. The method was soon debunked as a myth by researchers at the University of California at Davis Olive Center.

Oz has fre­quently come under fire from his peers in the med­ical pro­fes­sion. A study pub­lished in the British Medical Journal on Oz’s med­ical advice found that more than half of his rec­om­men­da­tions had no sci­en­tific sup­port, or con­tra­dicted sci­en­tific evi­dence out­right.

In April 2015, a group of ten physi­cians from across the United States, includ­ing Henry Miller, a fel­low in sci­en­tific phi­los­o­phy and pub­lic pol­icy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, sent a let­ter to Columbia University call­ing Oz’s fac­ulty posi­tion unac­cept­able. They accused Oz of ​“an egre­gious lack of integrity by pro­mot­ing quack treat­ments and cures in the inter­est of per­sonal finan­cial gain.”

Georgia has food libel laws with a lower legal bur­den than tra­di­tional libel laws of other states mak­ing it eas­ier for food com­pa­nies to sue peo­ple who make dis­parag­ing remarks about their prod­ucts.