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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), maté (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.
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