Kimkins Controversy - Kimkins Scam

Kimkins Review

This episode of the Dick Van Dyke show is called Never Name a Duck.

Professional affiliate marketer Wouter Van Dyke has done what most pros do with sites that market products that have had the new wear off. He has moved on and ceased working on Kimkins Review but he has left it on autopilot so that it can still potentially generate some revenue. Some Kimkins critics have tried to convince him to remove the fraudulent claims from the site, using the argument that he is at risk of civil or legal action. Wouter is probably correct in his assumptions about the situation. The old TV show has two opening credit scenes, the one shown above and also one in which Van Dyke deftly walks around the ottoman.

Kimkins Exposure

The tangled web that is the Kimkins Controversy was given the cookie-cutter treatment of television journalism a few days ago. It is great that countless people who may have never heard of Kimkins got the basic messages that it is a fraud and that it is not a well researched and safe way of eating.

Actually, I am curious as to how many people would have seen this item on Good Morning America. I was surprised to learn that the TV show is aired in Europe, the Middle East, the Philippines and Australia. The show spent a lot of years as the #1 morning show in America. In November 2006, GMA averaged 5.1 million viewers. It has been a close second to The Today Show for many years.

So it’s quite likely that millions of people saw this news item. The only website that was mentioned and shown on television was Heidi’s site. It may be a bit early to look for the effect of the television exposure on her traffic, but so far it seems to have been minimal.

Does Media Coverage Hurt Kimkins Sales?

The adage that there is no such thing as bad press, has got to be one of the most enduring ‘not quite true’ adages ever. In the moment, the Woman’s World coverage was tremendously beneficial to Heidi Diaz, but it probably hastened the exposure of the fraud. In contrast, the eventual coverage of the fraud by mainstream media might have inadvertently caused a small up tick in sales.

Now that ABC News is working on a story about the Kimkins diet scam, the website will get a big spike in traffic. I sounds crazy to say that this will increase sales when it is a story about a fraud and about a diet that some doctors and dietitians have advised against trying. This reminds me, has anyone ever published an analogy between post exposure Kimkins membership and those women who mail proposals to men on death row?

Revisiting the ‘New Ownership’ Ruse

I don’t have any inside information on the whole ‘Kimkins under new ownership’ statement that was floated around before the legal case got traction. It just popped into my head and I wondered to myself what the ramifications would have been if Heidi Diaz had sold the Kimkins business to another real live person.

I heard a sad story once about a European investor that bought a mine site unseen from a company that had closed it up many months or years before that. The buyer understood that it was all hooked up with lighting and ventilation and other equipment. Neither party were aware that a local petty criminal had used his truck and some delinquent helpers to pull all the electrical wiring out of the mine so he could sell it as scrap copper. It wasn’t a copper mine. It wasn’t a diet site either, so I don’t know why I’m talking about it. There must be a good ’shaft’ reference in here somewhere.

People Continue to Defend Heidi and Kimkins

YouTube commentary is truly the lowest form of discourse. The anonymity encourages people to throw all semblance of civility out the window. Lying and outright outrageousness are pastimes for many users. But I digress… what I really wanted to post about was the fact that someone chose to post a comment on the YouTube version of the Heidi Diaz surveillance video this week. It is not a smart ass kid or a petty jokester, someone wanted to express their outrage about the exposure and defend the diet against its detractors. I will quote it in its entirety:

People should be ashamed of themselves. Invading someone’s privacy because the diet failed for you or caused a side effect. NEWSFLASH, all diets cause side effects, some minimal and others more extreme. No one held a gun to your head and forced you to join the kimkins site or to even do the diet. This diet works wonders for people who are SEVERLY obese, not people who need to lose 10 pounds to fit into their party dress for the weekend.

I think that this 25 year old American Girl with the really pretty name and no videos or favorites might even be Kimmer.

What Kimkins Debate?

A few days ago the page on Kimkins.com that was formerly called Controversy was rewritten and renamed The Kimkins Debate. Actually, this title is used for the link on the homepage. It seems to me that someone decided that controversy was a bad word. Maybe Heidi imagined people looking at her front page and seeing the word controversy. She imagined them doing a search using that word.

A search using the words ‘Kimkins Debate’ does not contain many of the more prominent sites that have played apart in exposing the fraud, yet. There are a few interesting sites that I haven’t had the chance to read that show up on a Kimkins debate search, mostly older posts from back when there were enough pro Kimkins voices to legitimately use the word debate.

What Can be Learned from the Kimkins Controversy?

How do you react when your children express curiosity in the interests and stories that you are pursuing online? There are a lot of life lessons to be learned from the Kimkins saga. Educators talk about ‘teachable moments’ and there have probably been a quite few of them in households where the exposure of the Kimkins fraud was being followed or carried out.

There’s a valuable lesson in business ethics. There’s a valuable lesson or two about human health. I think there are even lessons to be learned about collaboration and communication. If you have teens looking over your shoulder occasionally, it may dawn on them that adults are just as prone to ‘teh drama’ as they are.

Patio Picture Mystery

The ‘patio picture’ that was used to ‘recreate’ the dramatic weight loss of the formerly anonymous Kimmer remains a mystery. I am personally happy to leave it that way. This photo was featured on the landing page of Kimkins.com up until just before the Woman’s World article came out. Heidi Diaz stated at the time that it was a current photograph of her taken by her son. This post is going to be my last mention of this picture unless someone actually can find out who it really is and where it came from.

Page Not Found

I have a page on this blog that was written many months ago. It has links to several blogs written by people who were at the time actively participating in and blogging about Kimkins. I called it Kimkins Diet Support. I just clicked on a bunch of links on the pages and found many 404 pages and several bloggers who just stopped posting in October. I am going to remove the page tomorrow. It is not good for SEO to have links that go out to Page Not Found. Everyone should keep this in mind for when Kimkins.com goes away.

The Diet Of Humankind

In the Wikipedia entry for Dieting there is a banner that says the following:

The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.

That statement made me start thinking. I actually wrote a rambling sanctimonious post and then self edited it down to nothing. I decided that it was better to just put it out there and let everyone think for themselves. I was just looking at the Wikipedia entry for “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” It’s hard to believe that it was well over 20 years ago. I think it is interesting that Bono is the only participant that is even remotely relevant today and he is also a man who is still working hard on behalf of the hungry people in the World.