And I don’t mean the pink mystery-meat made famous by Hormel, either.  It’s the e-mail kind… for weight loss products, in particular. According to this report on Psych Central:

Have you ever wondered who actually buys anything advertised via spam emails?

It turns out that when it comes to weight loss spam, the answer is simple — young adults.

New research has found that 41 percent of college students with weight problems opened and read spam e-mail advertising weight loss products.

The researchers found that those with weight problems were three times more likely to open/read and also three times more likely to purchase weight loss products from this spam e-mail, compared to those without weight problem. The study also found that increased psychological stress was associated with an increase in purchases of these weight loss products advertised in spam e-mail.

According to a related report in the NYT, Dr. Fogel was pretty surprised by the results:

“I was shocked by the results,” said Dr. Fogel, whose research focuses on the Internet and consumer behavior. “Even among those with no weight problems, 5.2 percent bought something. It may be that young adults are hypersensitive to weight issues and they think, ‘this can’t hurt.’ ”

What’s the problem?  The problem is that there are a LOT of bogus weight loss/health-related products marketed through spam e-mails… weight loss spam ranks Number 4 on the top 10 list of e-mail scams maintained by OnGuardOnline.gov. College students – who may already be debt up to their eyeballs – could end up paying more than they bargained for.

I suppose it would be easy to dismiss this, and say “well, sometimes kids have to learn about this stuff the hard way” – but it all seems so avoidable, somehow.  I’d love to see more consumer education aimed at younger people, so that they enter adulthood better equipped to deal with commercial messages that we’re all inundated with.

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