The claims
As for the product itself, Epperly, a random woman from Ohio, claims to have developed and used it to cure herself of chronic illnesses, allergies and a range of common ailments. As she sees it, her juice targets candida, which is a fungus that naturally occurs in the gut, but which Epperly claims, as laid out in her self-published manifesto Candida: Weaponized Fungus Mainstreaming Mutancy and based on no understanding of human or other biology whatsoever, does not only attract gut parasites but is the root cause of all human disease, broadly construed. As the story goes, candida supposedly causes harmful bacteria to multiply and create holes in the intestine, which again allows toxins from food to enter one’s bloodstream; Epperly refers to the process as “leaky gut syndrome”, an expression she picked up, with no recognizable attempt to understand or assess it, from other woo sites on the internet.
Though her product doesn’t, in fact, target candida, which has nothing to do with any of the conditions she describes, consuming a gallon of the juice every day will, as Epperly sees it, prevent leaky guts and cure you of (among other things):
- Autism
- Cancer
- Psoriasis
- HIV
- Down’s syndrome
- Being gay or transgender: According to Epperly, the gay and the transgender are caused by mutations in the reproductive system (“is our society ready to accept that gay lesbian and transgender is a mutation of the human body,” she asked her followers), and as such curable by her fermented cabbage.
The juice can also reverse vasectomies, apparently: “Yes it will reverse his vasectomy just as it will untie your tubes if you had your tubes tied. Remember mother nature did not intend for you to have your tubes tied or men to have vasectomies that’s all Western medicine we’re reversing all of what western medicine has done to mutate us,” Epperly responded to a potential cult follower. Open your mind. “It’s very easy to make broad claims when you understand how the human body works and you see very specific measurable results in real time within,” says Epperly, and that passage constitutes the totality of the evidence she has for her claims. Indeed, just for good measure (if you’re following her at this point, there’s probably no limit to what she’ll get away with), the juice can also cause you to regrow lost limbs and organs, reverse balding, and let you live to be over 400 years old (or forever).
No, Epperly does of course nott provide evidence for the claims; indeed, Epperly provides no hint that she recognizes evidence as a relevant parameter. Nor does she provide any indication of what the mechanisms by which her product would achieve the alleged effects would be supposed to be, beyond incoherent ranting that doesn’t even amount to technobabble, since Epperly doesn’t have the necessary vocabulary to technobabble: “We’re using a different context in my world, and the manifestations from the salt and the accessing of the nutrients is gonna give you a different context of what the symptoms are. So essentially what it is, is we’re trying to turn an atheist into a Christian,” says Epperly– i.e. (to the extent that the thought process is intelligible), ingesting fermented cabbage water will change your perception of your symptoms and thereby change the underlying disease, because religion. It is probably unnecessary to point out (though we’ll repeat it) that Jilly Juice won’t target candida, even though – and more importantly – none of the conditions she claims to target have anything to do with candida.
The consequences
What the juice actually does, if consumed at the recommended dosage of a gallon a day, is to cause (through salt poisioning) severe nausea, headaches, dizziness, fever and potentially death from hypernatremia, which Epperly describes (perhaps not the death part) as “feeling the healing”. A gallon of Jilly Juice contains, after all, roughly 28,008 mgs of sodium, which is roughly 12.5 times the recommended maximum daily dosage. It will also, notably, cause explosive blasts of diarrhea: Epperly calls these affectionately “waterfalls” and denies that the diarrhea is real diarrhea – rather, ‘waterfalls’ flush out the parasites, which are then visible in the toilet bowl (which has lead to some hellishly deranged pareidolic images around the internet). Her website’s FAQ section does in fact contain a few actual pieces of fact about water and salt cut and pasted from the Internet – though mixed with e.g. claims that salt is a “positive element” for the immune system, whatever that means – that stand out as grammatically coherent sentences containing real words in a sea of garbled handwavey word salads. She does claim that“I get all my information from PubMed, from government resources,” but also that “I pull it all together to have a different intention”. That’s one way of putting it.
In fact, Epperly has basically admitted that she just made everything up as she went along and that her facebook cult served as a laboratory of sorts: She’d watch how “the protocol” affected her followers, and adapt her ideas to the results. The idea that her product expels parasites, for instance, was one that only emerged after people posted photos of their bowel movements to the group. “The group actually was a research tool, a database tool, to share what they were passing. And I’m like, Oh my god. That’s coming out of you in waterfalls?”
Nonetheless, Epperly also claims that infants can benefit from drinking her juice in addition to breast milk: “a baby could potentially live on this along with coconut oil and be fine, and would be able to flourish and grow because they’re getting access to nutrients.” And cult members have indeed been documented to be feeding her product to sick children – indeed, Epperly has herself encouraged using force to inject her product into children who resist, and is on record trying to convince parents that babies will grow demons inside of them if they are not given her juice (Epperly seems to believe, at least occasionally, that the alleged parasites are demonic entities that can influence our personalty, moods and thoughts). As for potential CPS attention, Epperly has recommended that parents should try to lie to them and that they anyways shouldn’t be worried because they are protected under “Kosher Laws”. Reality will present her followers with a constant flow of surprises.
Her cult rules include“never trust a fart” (that’s no. 1), “even if you think you’ve only pee’ed, take a swipe at your backside just to make sure” and “your most common phrases will soon be ‘pain is healing’ ‘i’m drinking the juice’ and ‘outta the way, I’m about to waterfall’”
Epperly’s claims relatively quickly gained the attention of otherwise toothless authorities, and the Ohio state Attorney General opened an investigation into her business in 2018 after multiple complaints and her product having contributed to at least one horrible death. Since Epperly’s understanding of legal matters seem to be roughly at the level of her understanding of human biology, she responded to formal requests with some strikingly dingbat rants, and was accordingly told by The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Ohio Attorney General to remove all unsubstantiated claims from her website and any other advertising materials. As for the aforementioned death – a patient suffering from cancer who substituted real medicine for her product – Epperly responded that the patient simply did not consume enough Jilly Juice, that he “really should have kept going” (her grasp of what actually happened seems flimsy and not entirely coherent), that the medical industry may have contributed to his death, that she “can’t be held accountable” for deaths resulting from her product, that“[o]ut of like 60,000 people that took my juice, how many people have [died]? It's not fair to hold me to that kind of standard”, and that “correlation does not mean causation”, which is … an interestingly desperate attempt in this context. Epperly was also temporarily banned from Facebook for violating the platform's hate speech rules by ranting wildly about homosexuals.
Content on her website (visits not recommended!), where Epperly markets herself as “I have a protocol to reverse 100% all of your health issues from A-Z forever vaccinated or not, except for major organ transplant patients and surrogate mothers until they bring the baby to term!!” and which includes private forums, can be accessed by paying $30 annually or $5 monthly, and also gives you the opportunity to sign up for private phone consultations at $70 an hour. To people complaining about the price, Epperly has a characteristically lucid message: “I’m not going to put up with somebody sniveling about how they can’t afford to pay for my site which is only $30 a year which is Pennies on the dollar and believe me if people want to know this information they will find a way to move Heaven and Earth and those who snivel and talk about how poor they are they just need to do the recipe and drink and drink.”
Even Dr. Phil admitted that Jilly Juice is a dangerous scam.
It is probably unnecessary to point out that Epperly’s actual background includes antivaccine activist and chemtrails conspiracy theorist, though it does help set the stage for her mainstay claim that the pharmaceutical industry is in a big conspiracy with doctors to keep consumers addicted to medications (which would, even if it were correct, of course course not be a shred of evidence that her own product is anything but mindrot– apparently some people need to have that pointed out to them). In one of her videos, Epperly also claims to have found confirmation for her theory that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer, but she is characteristically short on details.
Apparently, she’s got a new book out, too, called Another Arm of the Hydra: The Undefined Life. Unfortunately, the blurb is completely incomprehensible (beyond that the book “is the beginning of the deprogramming so you could save yourself, if you choose”) and we aren’t going to get hold of a copy. It does come with the familiar and completely fake Schopenhauer quote about stages of truth that signals a particularly daft attempt at Galileo gambitry, though.
Diagnosis: Genuinely stupid, dangerous and completely incoherent, yet Epperly is apparently in possession of some sort of disarming charisma that managed to pull in enough people at her own or even lower levels of cognitive functioning to create a rather substantial cult – and it is, undeniably, a cult, one that has caused considerable harm to its members and innocent bystanders (in particular children at the mercy of cult members). The whole thing is really one of the most bizarre events in the history of the Internet, and that’s no small feat.
Hat-tip: Rationalwiki