Tea Life's Metabome Tea ads promised weight loss with no diet or exercise

Tea Life sold 'メタボメ茶', a pouch-tea product of 30 tea bags, via catalogs and booklets distributed with mail-order goods by the retailer Belluna. The ads promoted it as a '中年太り解決読本' (middle-aged weight-gain solution) that would return the reader to 'the slim me of those days'.

The copy ran dramatic before-and-after testimonials — '96kg → 53kg, minus 43kg in two and a half years', 'minus 3.7kg in about three months' — and claimed the tea's ingredients delivered the effect. A key line asked how the reader could drop weight 'without strict dieting or hard exercise', implying the tea alone caused the loss.

The CAA and the Fair Trade Commission's Chubu Office found the ads conveyed that consuming the product would produce significant slimming effects from the tea's own action, without diet or exercise. On 6 March 2024 they issued a surcharge payment order of ¥17,710,000 under Article 8(1) of the Act, covering misleading catalogs distributed from April 2018 to June 2019. Disclaimers that the stories were fiction or that results varied were held not to cure the overall impression.