Healthy business: Snake oil or cure-all? Nutrition supplements are booming in Utah

Five days before the 2005 Super Bowl, nobody knew if wide receiver Terrell Owens would play.

Six weeks before, the Philadelphia Eagles star broke his leg and severely sprained his ankle. If he played in the Super Bowl, his doctors warned, he could suffer a career-ending injury. Owens knew he would play. God had a plan for him, he said.

Plus, he'd been drinking noni juice.

"It's weird tasting, but it's supposed to make you heal," Owens said. "I don't know where the juice is from."

Soon the world was wondering the same thing. Before long, the phones at Provo-based Tahitian Noni International, the world's top maker of noni juice, were ringing off the hook.

"It was a totally unsolicited endorsement," recalls Shon Whitney, TNI's general manager of North American sales. "It was great."

True to his word, Owens played, catching the ball nine times for 122 yards. The press declared it a modern-day miracle.

As miraculous as Owens' recovery was, the story of the company that brought noni juice to the world is perhaps even better.

In the mid-1990s, Utah food scientist John Wadsworth traveled to Tahiti to find a fruit Polynesian healers had supposedly used for thousands of years.

After days of searching, Wadsworth stepped from his Jeep, tired and discouraged. Taking in a sunset, his eyes followed the rays of sun to a valley below and a lush grove of wild noni trees.

"As I was struck with this beauty," Wadsworth recalls on the company Web site, "a very powerful impression came to me, 'This fruit has been preserved from the world, and now is the time to take it to the world.' "

So Wadsworth took the fruit home, and by 1996 the first bottles of noni juice were ready for mass consumption. Rumors quickly spread that the sour, purple juice cured everything from AIDS to cancer. A dying man in Nevada ordered bottles by the caseload to bathe in. Others rubbed it on horses to cure festering wounds.

By 2001, TNI — or Morinda — was raking in the money, with annual sales topping $300 million.

The next year, an independent research marketing firm declared that "fewer than 10 private companies in the history of the world have been able to equal Tahitian Noni International's first six years of growth."

Today, TNI has 1.3 million distributors in 73 countries and an annual revenue of $550 million.

Dietary supplements — herbs, noni juice, multivitamins — were once the domain of hippies and fitness freaks, backpackers and chiropractors. Not anymore.

Now everyone from Terrell Owens to the next door neighbor uses them. In fact, one in five Americans takes some sort of supplement daily. A third have used herbs at least once to treat everything from colds to headaches, depression to diarrhea.