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Non-Profit Yu Foundation Files Lawsuit against Twinlab and Naomi Whittel
[September 13, 2018]

Non-Profit Yu Foundation Files Lawsuit against Twinlab and Naomi Whittel


The non-profit George W. Yu Foundation for Nutrition and Health, Inc. has filed a lawsuit against vitamin and supplement company Twinlab Consolidated Holdings, former CEO Naomi Whittel and others, claiming the defendants used "fraud, deceit, trickery as well as unfair and illegal methods" to record presenters during a Yu Foundation educational conference retreat, using the content for a commercial sales video about weight loss.

The eight-count lawsuit, filed in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, is seeking more than $75,000 in damages for each count, including civil conspiracy, breach of contract, fraud, unjust enrichment and invasion of privacy.

The case stems from a November 2017 retreat on cancer and Alzheimer's disease in Linthicum, Md. hosted by the Yu Foundation featuring lectures and discussions by 44 world-renowned doctors, scientists and health experts. The lawsuit claims the defendants registered as exhibitors but instead claimed to be associated with the Foundation and "would surreptitiously record portions of the retreat and attempt to recreate and reproduce other portions of the retreat, through improper, unlawful and fraudulent means."

The lawsuit states the defendants "were repeatedly seen with cameras in or near the Retreat's venues, including hallways, conference rooms, auditoriums, exhibitor spaces and dining and meeting areas. When spotted by Retreat organizers, they were asked to leave. Nonetheless, they continued to return."

According to the complaint, the unauthorized video and audio recordigs were used in the series "The Real Skinny on Fat," featuring Whittel as a co-host and interviews with experts who attended the Yu Foundation retreat.



"Foundations are meant to serve the public, but commercial companies are taking advantage of foundation work without permission and using it in sales videos for their products and promotion," said Andrei Palmer, member of the board of directors of the Yu Foundation. "This goes against our principles and has already damaged our credibility. Speakers came from around the world based on our reputation but many will never come back because of this kind of intrusion.

"We are a small non-profit organization dedicated to serving the public and we cannot let corporations take advantage of our unbiased, science-based content to sell their products," he said.


About the Yu Foundation and Dr. George Yu

The Yu Foundation, founded in 2006, supports groundbreaking research into the links between nutrition and health and cancer. The Yu Foundation works to discover research which may have gone unnoticed by other funding sources with an immediate goal of providing a metabolic approach to cancer. With a mission to display the influence of nutrition on health and chronic disease, preserve cellular regeneration and stem cell research, and prevent and remove accumulated body toxic chemical burdens, the Foundation gives preference to efficient and low overhead research.

Dr. George Yu trained in general surgery at Harvard Peter Bent Brigham and in Urological cancer at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Dr. Yu then spent the next 25 years performing urological and pelvic cancers with complex reconstructions surgery at George Washington University Medical Center and Anne Arundel Medical Center in Maryland.

Over the next 15 years, Dr. Yu realized the prior work of Johns Hopkins' Peter Petersen, and the late Albert Lehninger and the late Don Coffey confirmed these audits results; calorie restricted ketosis diets led to partial cancer atrophy that patients could implement themselves while using additional conventional treatments. The Foundation goal became clear. To advance basic science and clinical research projects and develop and promote nutritional restricted calorie ketogenic diets as adjunctive strategies to combat carcinomatosis. For more information about the Yu Foundation, including the lawsuit, visit www.yufoundation.org.


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