Falling for ‘Niagara’

May 18, 2001 — What’s blue, comes in bottles, costs a hefty chunk of change per dose and is reputed to enhance sexual performance? If you said Viagra, you’re close but no cigar. The stuff in question is an herbal beverage called Niagara (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), made in Sweden and billed by its U.S. distributor as “Romance in a bottle.”

The distributor, Lari Williams, who describes herself as “just a little girl from Arkansas trying to bring romance back to the bedroom” is doing it with the help of Nerve, a magazine that unabashedly peddles itself as “more graphic, forthright, and topical than ‘erotica,’ but less blockheadedly masculine than ‘pornography,’” according to the company’s mission statement. In other words, Nerve aims for a demographic somewhere between Reader’s Digest and Hustler.

Niagara is a fruit-flavored blue-dyed concoction containing carbonated water and sugar spiked with the alleged herbal aphrodisiac damiana (reputed to be a plant estrogen), plus ginseng (a root commonly used in Chinese medicine), guarana (a stimulant similar to caffeine), mat (another stimulant), schizandra (a Chinese medicinal said to have aphrodisiac and stimulant properties), plus as much caffeine as an eight ounce cup of coffee.

Williams tells WebMD that she discovered Niagara at a food and gifts trade show in Dallas last January. “I tried it one night and realized that it definitely had an effect on me, and I told my husband ‘I’m buying 3,000 bottles’ because it was close to Valentine’s Day, and he was going ‘Oh my gosh, no you’re not,’ and I went ‘Yes I am’ and he was just about to kill me. Well, we sold 15,000 bottles in two days. We had to make two trips to Dallas to go pick up more product.”

Williams, owner of a gourmet coffee and food shop in Little Rock, adds that “here in Arkansas we have what we call ‘Niagara Nights.’ People get their six-pack or two or three bottles and walk out the door high-fiving each other going ‘Ooh, we’re having a Niagara night tonight!’”

One of William’s customers, a 45-year-old saleswomen, told Arkansas Times in March that “I usually wear down … I was hanging in there. I was proud of myself … It lights your fire.” Another said, “It made me feel really warm, really sensual, … much more sensitive.”

Testimonials are one thing, but proof is another. Because the combination of ingredients in Niagara has never been subjected to scientific scrutiny, it’s difficult to know whether Niagara actually stimulates the female libido.

“The problem with a lot of these aphrodisiacs — and it’s a problem with the whole herbal industry — is the fact that there’s no validation of the product and it’s not under any kind of FDA control,” says Eloy Rodriguez, PhD, professor of plant biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Rodriguez tells WebMD that he previously investigated damiana (which Williams says is the main active ingredient in Niagara), but found no biochemical evidence that it had sexual stimulatory properties. In the book A Modern Herbal, published in 1931 and revised in 1971, Mrs. M. Grieve described damiana as “a mild purgative, diuretic, tonic, acting directly on the reproductive organs, stimulant … aphrodisiae.”

If the claims about Niagara’s effects are unproven, what’s certain is that a lot of people are excited about the product, including Williams, who saw sales skyrocket after her web site was featured on a segment of ABC’s Good Morning America. The Playboy mansion recently ordered more than 1,400 bottles of Niagara, and it’s being hawked on the Internet auction site eBay for $50 per bottle and up (it retails for $29.95 a six pack) says Alisa Volkman, a spokeswoman for Nerve.com. Niagara has popped up on NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s chatfest The View, and the Montel Williams show.

The folks at Nerve and its online incarnation are in ecstasy as well: after they “broke” the Niagara story on their Web site in March, they agreed to develop a Web site for Williams to push the product. They have also just nailed down a film development deal with Revolution Studios, which has acquired the rights to the story for a production company partly owned by Julia Roberts and Adam Sandler, with a script being developed for Sandler, says Volkman, who is also vice president for film development at Nerve.

The folks at Pfizer, manufacturer of Viagra, are pretty worked up about Niagara too. They took Williams to court for trademark infringement, but failed to get a temporary restraining order. In his decision the Arkansas judge was quoted as saying “if men can have Viagra then women should be able to have Niagara.”

For the moment at least, women have their Niagara. Williams assures WebMD that neither she nor anyone connected with the beverage makes medical claims for it, which would be a violation of FDA regulations. In 1989, the FDA issued a statement that there is no scientific proof that any over-the-counter aphrodisiacs work to treat sexual dysfunction, and the agency has issued recall requests of some products with aphrodisiac claims.

“I can only tell people that they must be smart and realize when somebody tells them ‘this is so-and-so,’ they have to rely on [the fact] that the person knows what they are talking about,” Rodriguez says. “Most of the time, they’re just carnival barkers that got fired.”

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