Doctors say Vietnamese consumers are being fooled by exaggerated ads about the cure-all benefit of nutritional supplements.

In Ho Chi Minh City, shops selling beauty care supplement food advertised to be high-quality imported products are numerous.

A fashion and cosmetic shop at 145A Nguyen Trong Tuyen Street in Phu Nhuan District for instance is known among many female customers as having a large supply of high-quality Japanese nutritional supplements.

Asked to introduce some skincare products, the shop owner showed Tuoi Tre a dozen different ones, including a box of Neo-Vita White Plus that costs VND550,000 (USD27).

“Take 6 tablets a day to whiten your skin, removing wrinkles and freckles and also giving you additional vitamins C and E,” she said, recommending some hair growth products for men.

Her products, she said, were all imported from Japan.

At another wholesale shop in Go Vap District, all supplement products were also said to be hand-carried goods from Japan, French, Australia, the US, and China.

This shop’s owner said the shop’s most popular product now is the Japanese supplement food BB Beast Beauty, which helps to enlarge women’s breasts.

In Hanoi, an online sales company is advertising two supplement products GoGoBig and Tighten Vagina Expert on its website as its most popular products.

GoGoBig will give customers a naturally looking sexy breast after 15 days and can also serve as an aphrodisiac, the ad says.

For its part, Tighten Vagina Expert is said to lessen the elasticity loss of pelvic and vaginal flaccid muscles because of pregnancy or age.

The website representative said these two products cost a total VND1 million (USD48.54) and could be delivered nationwide.

Although the products are supposed to be hand-carried from Japan, Tuoi Tre found a Vietnamese label on one of the GoGoBig boxes.

Websites selling nutritional supplements with dubious origins like this have mushroomed in HCMC and Hanoi and have attracted many customers.

Many pharmacies also have a considerably large space to store and present supplements and so do supermarkets which sell these products as “diet food”.

An employee of a pharmacy near Tan Dinh Market in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1 said more and more people are using nutritional supplements.

“There are now supplement food for every kind of disease,” he said.

But doctor Dang Cong Han from the Ho Chi Minh City-based Gia Dinh Hospital said Vietnamese consumers are overusing supplements.

“Nutritional supplements in Vietnam are advertised as being able to cue diseases, which makes consumers overestimate the effect of supplement foods and overuse them,” he said.