Julie is one sexy lady.

Sometimes dressed in a partially unzipped wedding gown, sometimes in a black bikini, Julie is being exposed, so to speak, in a blitz of cross-country ads running in newspapers, magazines, and shopping malls and on buses, subways, bus shelters, and TV. Julie is also showing up in doctors’ offices.

“I am Julie,” the public ad shouts. “Just for kicks, I tried on my wedding dress. It fit perfectly! What would you do with a few pounds less?”

And there she is, dark hair piled high on her head, smooth and sculpted back turned to the camera.

Doctors in Quebec received a flyer depicting Julie’s shapely derriere in garter belt and stockings (cut off at the waist and thighs, no head).

“Hier soir, j’ai fait un striptease á mon mari,” Julie boasts. (Translation: “Yesterday evening, I did a striptease for my husband!”) Ah, those Frenchies.

But what exactly is Julie selling? And who is putting her up to it? It’s hard to know, given that these ads are totally anonymous. No company name. No product brand. No logo. All they do is urge viewers to see their doctor “about medical weight loss treatments.”

Those treatments have nothing to do with diet or exercise, the two stalwarts in the battle against unwanted poundage, and everything to do with drugs. Or, to be precise, a drug. The advertiser is Hoffman-LaRoche, a pharmaceutical company that makes an anti-obesity drug called Xenical. The company is forced to sell its product in this underhanded way because direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs is illegal in Canada. That means that ads naming drugs or drug makers are not allowed.

University of B.C. health policy researcher Barbara Mintzes has studied the effects of DTCA and concludes that when it comes to drugs, advertising is not a healthy thing. When drugs are flogged, more people take them. But some of those drugs are not appropriate, needed, or safe, as the recent Vioxx debacle so clearly shows.

Mintzes describes the ‘I am Julie’ campaign as “atrocious” and possibly illegal.

“This is a way of getting around the law against DTCA by not naming the product,” Mintzes writes in an e-mail interview from England. “If a woman goes to her doctor and mentions the ad campaign, the company is hoping she will get a prescription for Xenical.…if this ad campaign is stimulating sales of a specific product, Xenical, then it is against Canadian law.”

Xenical and Julie are an interesting couple for a number of reasons, not least because they feed society’s pathological obsession with body image and weight. The drug is approved by Health Canada for the treatment of obese people with a body mass index (BMI) of greater than or equal to 30, or greater than or equal to 27 when other disease risk factors such as high blood pressure exist. Xenical is not approved for use in people who are simply overweight or who just want to lose a few pounds. In other words, it is not approved for Julie, who looks like she has always been a size 10.

Canadian Women’s Health Network staffer Barbara Bourrier-La Croix is so incensed by the Julie ads that she created a parody ad called “I am Barbara” (online at cwhn.ca). In it she confesses that “I wanted to do a striptease for my husband, but I was too tired after doing the laundry, taking my daughter swimming, getting the groceries, cleaning the bathroom, making lunches, emptying the cat litter box, and ironing.”

Unlike other anti-obesity drugs, Xenical doesn’t suppress appetite. It blocks the absorption of dietary fat by about 30 per cent. In other words, you can eat a bag of potato chips and only take in about 70 per cent of the fat content. The rest is expelled. This produces some very unpleasant side effects, including oily spotting, flatulence with discharge, increased defecation, and fecal incontinence, effects that should please the adult diaper industry. More than a quarter of people who were enrolled in three clinical trials of the drug withdrew during the first year. No wonder.

But does Xenical work? Does it help obese people lose weight and thus reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or death? Here’s what the studies show: Obese patients on Xenical who were also on a low-fat diet lost about 3.3 kilograms (about seven pounds) in the first year. When scientists at UBC’s Therapeutics Initiative studied the research on Xenical, they concluded: “Adverse gastrointestinal effects are frequent and it is unknown whether [Xenical] affects morbidity or mortality linked to obesity.”

Shines a whole new light on Julie, doesn’t it? But these days when sex sells everything, why not use her to shill a drug that will inevitably be taken by those who are far from obese, and who will, in many cases, um, sully their drawers?