The CEO of a dietary supplement company typed a fake legal document into existence on March 9, 2020, backdated it to 2017, signed it on behalf of both companies involved, and then handed it to federal court investigators as if it were real.

The Supplement Company That Sold You a Fantasy

ThermoLife International LLC licenses patented creatine nitrate technology to supplement manufacturers. One of those manufacturers, Muscle Beach Nutrition (MBN), sold a product called CRTN-3 from 2017 to 2021. The label on that product told consumers the supplement would “increase vasodilation”, a claim implying better blood flow, better performance, better results.

The inconvenient truth, confirmed by BPI Sports’ own expert witness during trial, is that the dosage of creatine nitrate in CRTN-3 would only produce vasodilation in people weighing 113 pounds or less. The average adult in the United States weighs approximately 177 pounds. ThermoLife sold this product with that claim printed on the label for four years.

BPI Sports, a competing supplement company, filed suit in February 2019, alleging false advertising under the federal Lanham Act and unfair competition under Florida state law. What followed was a case that revealed far more about ThermoLife’s willingness to deceive than anyone expected when it started.

The Label Said One Thing. The Science Said Another.

Vasodilation is the widening of blood vessels. Supplement companies use this term to imply their product will boost athletic performance by increasing blood and oxygen delivery to muscles. It is a powerful marketing claim. It sells products.

The science behind CRTN-3’s specific dosage, however, did not support that claim for the overwhelming majority of the people buying it. The jury at trial found the “increase vasodilation” statement to be literally false. The appeals court then reversed that finding on a narrow legal technicality: because the claim could theoretically be true for a very small subset of users, it could not be called “literally false” in the legal sense.

The appeals court also confirmed that BPI presented no evidence that consumers were actually deceived into purchasing CRTN-3 because of that label, which killed the misleading-advertising angle as well. The legal system handed ThermoLife a win on the false advertising claims. The fabricated document situation, however, was a different story entirely.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Cannot Measure

Every person who bought CRTN-3 expecting a real physiological boost was operating on false information. They read “increase vasodilation” on the label, trusted it, and made a purchasing decision based on it. That trust was manufactured by a marketing claim that ThermoLife and MBN knew, or should have known, only applied to a fraction of their customer base. The product was being sold to average-sized adults using language calibrated to apply, at best, to very small individuals.

This is the texture of modern supplement industry deception. It does not arrive as an outright lie screaming at you. It arrives as a technical half-truth buried in marketing copy, printed in confident font on a professional label, backed by enough scientific terminology to feel legitimate. Consumers cannot be expected to calculate whether a milligram-per-kilogram dosage ratio applies to their specific body weight before purchasing a gym supplement. That calculation requires expert knowledge. ThermoLife had the expert knowledge. Their customers did not.

“The company held the science. The customer held the bottle. Only one of those parties knew the label was telling an incomplete story.”

The betrayal runs deeper when you look at who buys creatine supplements. These are people who are investing time, discipline, and money into their physical health. They show up to the gym. They track their nutrition. They believe the products they purchase are doing what the label says. ThermoLife exploited that belief system. The “increase vasodilation” claim targeted exactly the kind of motivated, health-conscious consumer who takes product labels seriously.

Then there is the courtroom conduct. Ronald Kramer, the sole owner and CEO of ThermoLife, typed a license agreement into existence on March 9, 2020, gave it a backdated effective date of March 16, 2017, and produced it in discovery without ever telling the opposing party when it was actually created. This is not a paperwork oversight. This is a deliberate act of deception directed at a federal court. The district court found it constituted bad faith and a fraud on the court. That finding was affirmed on appeal.

A System That Rewarded the Conduct It Punished

The jury found false advertising. The jury found unfair competition. Then the jury awarded zero dollars in damages. The appeals court reversed the verdict entirely. ThermoLife sold supplements with a misleading label for four years, fabricated a legal document during the litigation it generated, fought in court to hide what it had done, and walked away without paying a cent to the party that sued them.

The only consequence that stuck was the sanctions order requiring ThermoLife to pay attorneys’ fees related to the discovery misconduct. No dollar amount for those fees appears in the source material. What is clear is that the underlying false advertising claim, the one that actually affected real consumers, was erased by the appeals court. The people who bought CRTN-3 believing it would improve their blood flow received nothing from this litigation. They were never parties to the suit. They were the invisible injured.

Legal Receipts: Straight From the Court Documents

These are direct quotes and factual findings from the federal court record. Every word below came from the judges, not from this publication.

“Mr. Kramer created the License Agreement on March 9, 2020, in an alleged attempt to memorialize a pre-existing ‘oral/implied’ license between ThermoLife and MBN. Also undisputedly, ThermoLife and Mr. Kramer did not inform BPI in its March 20, 2020, production that Mr. Kramer had created the License Agreement on March 9, 2020.” Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, BPI Sports v. ThermoLife International LLC, June 16, 2025

“The district court found that Mr. Kramer acted in bad faith by knowingly fabricating the License Agreement and repeatedly obstructing discovery to conceal this fraud.” Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, summarizing the district court’s Sanctions Order findings

“Mr. Kramer ‘initially tried to pass’ the License Agreement ‘off as legitimate to advance his case’ and ‘impeded the presentation of [BPI’s] case’; [and] ‘tried to prevent discovery of the circumstances surrounding the License Agreement’ by offering to indemnify and hold MBN harmless if the court maintained the existing pretrial deadlines.” Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, quoting district court findings, June 16, 2025

“During discovery, after compelled to do so by the Court, Defendants disclosed the metadata associated with the License Agreement.” District Court findings as quoted by the Federal Circuit, emphasis in original

“BPI’s own evidence shows that the dosage disclosed in CRTN-3’s label would ’cause vasodilation’ for people weighing 113 pounds or less… BPI’s own expert admits that it is not literally false that CRTN-3 ‘increase[s] vasodilation.'” Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, June 16, 2025, explaining its reversal of the false advertising verdict

“Bad faith may exist where a ‘fraud has been practiced upon [the court], or that the very temple of justice has been defiled.'” Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, citing Chambers v. NASCO (1991), upholding the Sanctions Order

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health: The Supplement Industry’s Accountability Gap

The dietary supplement industry operates in a regulatory environment where companies can make performance claims on product labels without the rigorous clinical trial requirements that apply to pharmaceutical drugs. CRTN-3’s “increase vasodilation” claim landed on shelves and stayed there from 2017 to 2021, four full years, despite the fact that the dosage only supported that claim for people under 113 pounds. No government regulator pulled the product. No pre-market review caught it. A private lawsuit by a competitor was the only mechanism that even attempted accountability.

This case illustrates the public health risk built into supplement industry self-regulation. People with cardiovascular concerns, people managing blood pressure, athletes optimizing for real physiological outcomes: all of these individuals could make health and training decisions based on label claims that a federal jury ultimately agreed were false. The court’s eventual reversal of the false advertising verdict on a legal technicality does not change the underlying science. The dosage did not support the claim for most people who bought it.

When the only enforcement pathway available to consumers is a competing company suing under a trademark statute, and that pathway results in a reversed verdict and zero damages, the public health protection system has functionally failed. The supplement stayed on shelves. The claim stayed on labels. The consumers absorbed the cost in the form of wasted money and unmet health expectations.

Economic Inequality: Who Pays When the System Fails

The only party who had both the resources and the legal standing to challenge ThermoLife’s label claims was another corporation. BPI Sports is a competing supplement manufacturer with the money to hire lawyers and fight a multi-year federal litigation. Individual consumers who bought CRTN-3 had no such recourse. A single customer who spent $40 (roughly two hours of minimum wage work) on a tub of CRTN-3 that did not perform as advertised had no realistic path to any legal remedy.

Corporate litigation under the Lanham Act, the statute BPI used, is designed to protect businesses from unfair competition, not to compensate individual consumers for being misled. Even after a jury found ThermoLife guilty of false advertising and unfair competition, the jury awarded zero dollars in damages because BPI could not prove quantifiable financial harm to itself as a corporation. The gap between “a jury found you lied” and “you owe anything for lying” is a gap that only wealthy corporate defendants know how to exploit.

ThermoLife, through its corporate structure, used MBN as the product-facing entity and ThermoLife as the patent licensor sitting one step removed from direct consumer contact. When BPI originally sued ThermoLife and Kramer directly, ThermoLife’s first move was to argue BPI was suing the wrong party entirely, because technically MBN was the one selling the product. This kind of corporate layering insulates the people who design and profit from misleading claims behind subsidiary structures that create legal distance between the decision-makers and the consequences.

The Cost of a Life: Doing the Math

What Now? Who to Watch and What to Do

The Corporate Roles That Made This Happen

• Ronald L. Kramer: President, CEO, and sole owner of ThermoLife International LLC; CEO of Muscle Beach Nutrition LLC. The individual the district court identified as personally creating the fabricated license agreement and orchestrating the discovery obstruction. The sanctions order naming him was affirmed on appeal.
• ThermoLife International LLC: Patent licensor for creatine nitrate technology. Licenses its patents to manufacturers and controls the intellectual property framework that governs how the product is made and marketed.
• Muscle Beach Nutrition LLC: The product-facing subsidiary that sold CRTN-3 directly to consumers. Admitted in federal court to be an alter ego of ThermoLife.

Regulatory Watchlist

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Primary federal authority over deceptive advertising claims in the supplement industry. Has the power to investigate and sanction false product label claims independently of private litigation.
• Food and Drug Administration (FDA): Regulates dietary supplement labeling under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). The “increase vasodilation” claim on CRTN-3 falls within FDA’s authority to review structure/function claims on supplement labels.
• Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection: Accepts consumer complaints about deceptive advertising at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Every complaint filed creates a paper trail that regulators use to identify patterns and build enforcement cases.
• State Attorneys General: Florida, where this case originated, and any state where CRTN-3 was sold has consumer protection authority to investigate unfair or deceptive trade practices independently of federal action.

What You Can Actually Do

The Lanham Act protects businesses. Consumer protection law protects you. If you purchased CRTN-3 or any supplement that made claims you believe were false, file a complaint directly with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and with your state Attorney General’s consumer protection office. These complaints are free, they are on the public record, and they are the raw material regulators use to build enforcement actions. Beyond individual complaints, support organizations like the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which has a track record of pressuring the FDA and FTC to enforce supplement labeling rules. Collective pressure from organized consumers has forced label changes and regulatory crackdowns that no single lawsuit ever achieved alone. No courtroom gave the buyers of CRTN-3 justice. The next enforcement action starts with the complaints you file today.