Before the company, Black Oxygen Organics, shut down, the mud was being sold for $110 a bag. The FDA is now telling customers to throw out the product after tests showed elevated levels of lead and arsenic.
Women have been using mud for facials for at least 5,000 years, but there's one expensive brand of mud the FDA is now recommending consumers throw away, thanks to the toxic substances it contains.
It’s called Black Oxygen Organics, and women around the world have been raving about the product, using it for facials and baths. Some people even drink it as a supplement and brush their teeth with it.
The company's founder, Marc Saint-Onge, was marketing the dirt as a miracle cure for all sorts of ailments, at $110 a bag.
“We have these therapeutic values in this particular mud,” Saint-Onge said.
Even the nation's No. 1 podcaster, Joe Rogan, was intrigued when an enthusiastic user talked about it.
So where does the mud come from? Inside Edition flew to the source to find out.
As the company’s CEO tells it, the dirt in the products can be traced back to soil scooped out of a peat bog in Ontario, Canada. But experts we spoke to say the muck may actually be more harmful than helpful.
The FDA is now telling customers to throw out the product after tests showed elevated levels of lead and arsenic.
Longtime customer Kara Ogden says she's infuriated.
“I was drinking it all day every day. The packaging says that you can use up to a tablespoon a day, and that's what I was doing,” Ogden said.
Lauren Kraft-Anderson says she took Black Oxygen daily as a prenatal supplement when she got pregnant.
“A few days after I found out about the recall, and I stopped taking it, I started to have a miscarriage,” she said.
She says she's devastated she'll never know for certain if the product caused the miscarriage and is now suing the company.
Atlanta attorney Matt Wetherington represents Lauren and many others in a lawsuit against Black Oxygen Organics. The company has not filed a response.
"They tell you that they want you to eat it, drink it, bathe with it, give it to your children, take it as a prenatal," Wetherington said. "They say it will cure all your diseases, but it's just dirt.
Trekking through the muck in Canada, Inside Edition chief investigative correspondent Lisa Guerrero caught up with the company's founder, but he didn't want to talk.
The company has since been shut down, and Saint-Onge has not responded to the lawsuit filed against him.
