SLAMBOARD

I just saw this on the Daily Mail website…

Almost everything about Jackie Cox mirrors the Kimkins Controversy.

• 500 calorie diet -check.
• Weightloss guru who is discovered to be obese -check.
• Dieters reporting hair loss and other health side effects -check.

There is one very important difference. As far as I know, Jackie Cox has never posted fake pictures of herself or fabricated facts about her own successful long term weight loss. The other difference may be a direct result of that difference. Her diet empire, LighterLife, continues to thrive and Jackie lives the good life in the Bahamas (a popular tax haven with the Brits).

Everybody is blogging about today’s health science news item. It seems that women’s brains are not as effective as men’s brains at suppressing food urges. I read through a couple of media interpretations of these findings and they both highlight suggestions that pregnancy hormones may play a role. I can see how that makes sense, but I also want to suggest something completely different.

I think it’s possible that there has been an evolutionary advantage to having men resist the urge to eat things. They have been the strongest and largest of the genders since before we were even people. A short list of foods that a caveman might not have been able to resist include food intended for babies, babies and mothers. The caveman that was able to resist eating this stuff had a better chance of passing on his genes.

I had a sort of ‘Scam Immersion’ therapy recently. I was taking care of the administrative duties for a new WAH website that reposts carefully reviewed job opportunities. I am so glad that we got a kind of blacklisting system installed. Before I got the blacklist configured, the site was pulling in around 7000 postings a day for me to review. That was impossible.

I was pretty ruthless with my keywords for the blacklist. I used words like ‘cash’ and ‘legitimate’ in addition to the web addresses and company names that I had identified as scams.

There have been a few business models that made for a tough call. There are multilevel marketing situations where recruiting down-line salespeople is more lucrative than selling the actual product or service. I am repulsed by these situations because they involve pressuring people to lie and exaggerate about how easy and lucrative the potential sales are in order to earn referral money. That being said, they are often selling actual products and some people are actually making money as salespeople/recruiters.

Longstanding MLMs appear to have people working hard to refute online criticism. I saw at least on person claim that he had a paid job spreading misinformation about an MLM on the scam-watch sites.

Independent distributors ALWAYS conceal the identity of the company when advertising WAH opportunities. I have decide to avoid reposting anything associated with Herbalife. They have been in business for over 20 years and are a publicly traded company. I am assuming, based on the information that I could find, that the vast majority of people who buy into the scheme end up losing money or at the very least wasting their time.

AmeriPlan is another very big MLM. The thing with both of these companies is that they are set up to have a logarithmically increasing number of salespeople serving a finite market. Ameriplan also has a dubious product. It sells discount health and dental plans that less thoughtful people might confuse with actual insurance. Salespeople who find out that the plan is under-served by doctors in their region have to make an ethical choice about whether or not to sell people something that is of little use to them.

What both of these MLMs have in common is a plethora of conflicting information on the internet coming from detractors and defenders who each have their own axes to grind. They are also instigated by companies that operate well within the bounds of the law while tacitly encouraging independent salespeople to act in ways that are legally and ethically questionable. I continue to debate myself about whether or not these are scams. I think the only people who will assure you that they are not scams are either making money from them or still hoping to make money from them.

Check out this site the investigates Herbalife.

First off, for the sake of search engines… X2O is a SCAM

This product is touted as a breakthrough discovery in natural science, but it is really just a means to an end for an MLM scheme. Multilevel marketing has to have a product in order to be legal in the USA and many other countries. Selling little bags of electrolytes to people who are desperate to lose weight fits the bill. I tried to find out exactly what was in the product, but the site is more about enlisting salespeople. They even sell amphetamines so they can have wired salespeople.

I have a life sciences degree and I can concur with the hype to the extent that drinking an adequate supply of water is important to good health.

Here is a silly testimonial that is meant to be taken seriously…

Testimonial:
I have been drinking 40-50 oz. of soda every night working the over night shift for the last 9 years. There are no words to explain how I feel after using X20. This product has been a blessing for me and my family. I feel alert, healthy and have more energy to work. As an added bonus…I LOST WEIGHT TOO! THAT IS GREAT! Thank you Xooma for this X20 product.

Hmm… So a Floridian stops drinking 40-50 ounces of soda and replaces it with water. That reduces daily caloric intake by over 500 calories, yet the happy customer credits the packets of proprietary electrolytes with the improved health and weight loss. Do you think that customer might also be selling the stuff?

EDIT: As an added bonus, this Weight Loss Water miracle comes complete with a Lexan bottle, which is quite possibly carcinogenic.

This is an interesting coincidence…

Yesterday I posted a movie and some commentary on the ethics of manipulating photos. Now there is a viral video from diet.com talking about the same thing, but with a diet and body image slant.

I haven’t actually listened to the whole thing, as I am supposed to be working. Some of the tricks remind me of some things that I saw on the ‘Watch Us Lose’ table on the front page of Kimkins over the last year or so. Of course some of Heidi’s pictures needed nothing more complicated than a slight vertical stretch to help recreate past weight loss success.

The seven figure sales at Kimkins.com were due in no small part to the favorable coverage in Woman’s World Magazine. This publication has huge circulation, and the print versions will often sit in waiting rooms and salons enjoying months or years of repeated perusal. People seeking to expose the Kimkins fraud did not get very far in trying to convince Woman’s World to make any kind of reversal or apology. We personally received no answers to our questions last year and instead got a cease and desist order. In response to the letter, I made changes to the cover image that I was using to make it arguably transformative. There was no follow up from the magazine. I didn’t send any further correspondence to them. Many, many interested people did.

After a long wait, the magazine has finally apologized in detail, on their website. A print apology is also forthcoming. I thank them for it.

Sugar Land, Texas is a nice place to live, according to Forbes and CNN. It is the headquarters for Imperial Sugar. This company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2001. It has since managed to turn itself around partly through smart business decision, downsizing and effective implementation of new technologies. Having a Texas politician in the White House may have been beneficial as well.

Another large sugar company is Flo-Sun, Inc. Its owners, the Fanjul brothers, make huge donations to politicians both Red and Blue. Their reward, in the form of their share of protective tariffs and price floors, equals approximately $65 million annually.

NAFTA may mean that Mexico will be able to step up sugar exports. I can only assume that lobbyists for the US sugar industry have the ear of government and that they are looking for ways to prevent that from happening.

This post is an example of me starting out with an assumption and then not finding any really interesting facts to support it. I find it interesting that the Fanjul brothers belong to two groups of people that are pointed to as being special interest groups that buy politicians. They are owners of a huge agribusiness and they are also Cuban Americans. They get to have two interests served for the price of one. It’s no wonder they are so generous.

I decided to make a brief post on this specific topic because there is still a lot of information on the Internet that is based on 1994 regulations. The FDA made some ‘final rulings’ related to dietary supplements in July of 2007.

I don’t see any fundamental changes from the 1994 law. The additions include current good manufacturing practice requirements and a requirement for companies to report adverse effects. These changes should increase consumers confidence in dietary supplements. The FDA website has lots of valuable information and advice related to dietary supplements.

I have researched some new products online and found that the web marketing of supplements is sometimes very secretive about the ingredients. I am suspicious that some companies hide behind the screen of claiming a proprietary blend of ingredients. Many products are aimed at making money from some positive buzz that a botanical ingredient is receiving without actually going to the expense of adding an effective dose of the ingredient. I have even heard of products that use botanical ingredients that are similar to a truly beneficial ingredient but are not, in fact, the exact species and varietal that has proven health benefits. I don’t think the FDA can prevent this. Buyer Beware is still a good slogan to keep in mind.

If you want to try a supplement that is getting good press, I would advise you to find the original science. Even if you can’t understand most of what is written in a medical journal, just copy down the full scientific name of the ingredient that is being touted and be sure that is what is in any supplement that you consider buying. Also, be sure to discuss any and all dietary supplements that you are taking with your doctor. Some supplements interact adversely with prescription and OTC drugs.

Results of a large study of the dietary habits of identical twins suggest that many dietary preferences have a genetic component. As reported in Twin Research and Human Genetics, 41%-48% of an individual’s leaning towards one of the food groups was influenced by genetics.

I am the father of identical twins. I can attest to them having almost identical food preferences. One child does not drink liquid milk unless she is eating a chocolate cupcake, while the other kids will drink milk occasionally by itself. One child prefers to avoid the olives on pizza while the other eats them. Those are the only differences that I can recall.

Source: BBC

Why isn’t this woman a celebrity? She has such a great personality. Her rant covers a number of topics to which overweight woman can relate.

Joy Nash makes one argument that really fits well with my business and marketing focus. She thinks that woman that are ‘plus-sized’ should boycott boutiques that do not carry good looking clothes in their size. I like her attitude about living an active, healthy lifestyle in which your weight is not being used as an excuse for not living. Her YouTube video has over 11,000 comments. I have not looked at them carefully, but I suspect that there are some mean ones, some cheerleading ones and probably a few that make reasonable arguments against some of what she says. Obesity is a condition that puts people at a greater risk for several adverse health conditions.