I highly recommend watching the THRIVE promo video above to get a sense of the glossy, glitzy spiel they’re selling.

The short answer to the above question is no. I recall someone made a claim that elevated Vitamin B in the Thrive patches could have caused mood swings in Chris Watts. This idea and all permutations of it are patently ridiculous. It’s comparable to soaking a band-aid in alcohol and then claiming you were driving under the influence not because you were drinking, but because of the band-aid.

There is some reason to believe adverse reactions are possible including fatigue, headaches and/or abdominal pain.

I suspect the folks who’ve started discussing this idea that the Thrive products “caused” Chris Watts to lose it and murder his pregnant wife and two children on August 13 misheard or misinterpreted someone saying effectively: “I’m telling you, the Thrive shit drove him nuts.”

That part may be and probably is true. Shan’ann was a network marketer, which basically means she turned her whole life [including her family] into a series of sales pitches. Meals become sales pitches. Holidays are all about peddling products and the “Thrive” lifestyle. Literally everything becomes subsumed by it. And to get a sense of this, one simply has to look at Shan’ann’s Facebook page. She’s a brand ambassador and pretty much all her marketing is done on Facebook. Those who cheerlead her efforts are other network marketers.

So, revisiting the question: “Could thrive supplements and patch be the cause of Chris Watts’s Rage?” In the sense that he became tired of the endless rah-rah that’s part and parcel of network marketing, the tireless always-on selling, literally day in and day out, it’s a valid question.

Very likely he was very put off by it, and let’s face it, someone like that who is selling your home life constantly on Facebook, putting a little jingle on every moment, over time isn’t going to tug at your heartstrings. It’s not romantic it’s mercenary. It’s not genuine moments, it’s financial desperation.

Although the Thrive business had a significant impact on Chris Watts’s disillusionment, it clearly wasn’t the main driving force in his motive to commit murder. It’s an important part of the puzzle certainly, but not the biggest part. Did it feed, in some way, into the motive? Absolutely.

To determine the extent of his disillusionment with her one only has to trawl through Shan’ann’s social media to get a sense of the sheer volume of the promotion. It’s difficult to come across a single picture of her without one of the patches featuring prominently. She also has her husband and kids posing endlessly to sell the Thrive lifestyle.

It looks exhausting. In her video feed she has 357 videos posted over a two year period. That’s almost a video every two days.

Her Facebook profile photo shows her prominently lifting her arm and displaying a patch. This is her version of her identity. This is her version of who she says she is.

Shortly after her death, after posting a few initial messages of support, her Thrive pals reverted to more endless, breathless promotion on Facebook.

It’s maddening, and if the social media of her closest friends and their mercenary attempts to sell sell sell so soon after her distressing death, then her own content clearly portrays something similar – there’s a mechanical sense of a brand and product eclipsing almost all the family stuff on her Facebook. She has two small children and had recently become pregnant, so for the product placement to eclipse the kiddie and family stuff takes some doing.

There’s also an irony in the endless promotion of Thriving while they – as a couple – were dying. They were bankrupt, Shan’ann had an autoimmune disease and her husband was actively cheating on her. But it was all being sold and packaged as a shiny fairy tale.

The real question is did she know how bogus it was beyond the financial ruin side of things? Did she know the family was a fiction, but was selling it anyway? Based on a few early accounts by friends that have come forward, she did know/suspected her husband was cheating on her, and still sold him as the best thing since sliced bread.

But was her marriage really a sham?

Well, wasn’t her job and what she was selling a sham too?