TV host and jewelry expert Carol Brodie watches her weight religiously. So when she heard about a 15-calorie per serving product called “Better Than Pasta,” she bought it.
“If I ate three or four bags of this, I was still looking at around 100 calories, so how great is that?" Brodie told NBC New York. "And I was going to get to fill up!”
But Brodie says her diet dream became a gastric catastrophe — in a hurry.
According to a federal lawsuit filed this month, Brodie was hospitalized after eating four packages of Better Than Pasta last summer. The complaint says she developed a “congealed mass of noodles” that blocked her digestive tract, forcing her to remain on a liquid diet “consisting entirely of Diet Coke and soup for longer than a month.”
“Every time I felt like my body was trying to get rid of it, that big mass would just hit so nothing could come out,” Brodie said. “It felt like I was dying, like I was choking to death.”
Brodie’s attorney, Rosemarie Arnold, says the makers of Better Than Pasta, a Wisconsin company called Green Spot Foods, should have known the product carried a substantial risk of serious digestive problems – partly because there are numerous complaints on Amazon, the platform on which Brodie purchased the noodles.
“When you swallow it, it doesn’t dissolve in your stomach and that’s why it was able to keep you full for so long,” Arnold said. “This company knew that this product was not safe to consume but they put it on Amazon.”
Brodie’s lawsuit also accuses Amazon of putting consumers at risk by allowing Better Than Pasta to be sold on the platform. A spokesman for Amazon declined to comment on the lawsuit. Better than Pasta has a 3.5-star rating on Amazon, but the I-Team found multiple consumers who wrote reviews echoing Brodie’s complaint.
