Pom Ads Selectively Quotes From Judge's Adverse Ruling Pom Wonderful, the provocative purveyor of pomegranate juice, began a highly aggressive ad campaign Thursday to challenge a potentially damaging ruling by an administrative judge, who found that the company had greatly exaggerated the product's health benefits. A Pom ad selectively quotes from a judge who ruled that health claims made about the juice were invalid. The ruling Monday by Judge D. Michael Chappell came in response to a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission two years ago. He found that the company had insufficient evidence to support claims that its juice reduced the risks of heart disease, prostate cancer and impotence, and issued a cease-and-desist order that forbids the company from making the claims for 20 years. Those aspects of the judge's ruling are not mentioned in Pom Wonderful's new ads, however. Rather, the ads use flattering phrases plucked from the ruling to recommend the health benefits of pomegranate juice and invited readers to "be the judge." "What you as a consumer of POM need to know is that the F.T.C. judge agreed that POM Wonderful 100% Pomegranate Juice and POMx do provide significant health benefits," the ad says. Here is what the judge said in his own words. The ad then supplies a quote from Page 282 of the 335-page ruling: "Competent and reliable scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the consumption of pomegranate juice and pomegranate extract supports prostate health, including by prolonging PSA doubling time in men with rising PSA after primary treatment for prostate cancer." But the sentence after that contains a caveat: "However, the greater weight of the persuasive expert testimony shows that the evidence relied upon by the respondents" - Pom Wonderful and its affiliate, Roll Global - "is not adequate to substantiate claims that POM products treat, prevent or reduce the risk of prostate cancer or that they are clinically proven to do so." The ads also quote Judge Chappell as saying the safety of pomegranate juice is not in doubt, though the commission never challenged it. Mary Engle, director of the commission's division of advertising practices, issued a statement declining further comment "because one or both parties are likely to appeal certain aspects of the administrative law judge's initial decision." The ads ran in the print editions of The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times and on the Web sites of The New York Times, The Huffington Post and CNN. Pomegranate was known to just 4 percent of the American public when the Pom Wonderful co-founder Lynda Resnick and her husband, Stewart, started the company in 2002, according to a New Yorker profile. The two built Teleflora, the Franklin Mint and Fiji Water into booming businesses before tackling pomegranate. They succeeded in getting Pom Wonderful onto television shows like "Desperate Housewives" and in gift bags handed to celebrities at awards ceremonies. Corey Martin, a Pom Wonderful spokesman, said in an e-mail that the company would run the new ads "as long as necessary to inform the public of the truth." He declined to disclose the budget for them.