Kimkins Controversy - Kimkins Scam

Food Safety

Have you ever thought that it’s possible that people who eat more meat as part of a low carb way of eating are at a higher risk of food borne illness? I don’t know if this is true. I do know that being careful and smart about handling meat can mean fewer bouts of illness for you and your family and reduce the likelihood of having a serious food poisoning occur.

I remember Oprah spending months harping on and on about not thawing out chicken on the counter. At the time, I have to admit that I found it annoying. Now I am wondering how many lives she may have saved with her tirades.

There are lots of government websites and other resources that can provide more accurate and complete information about food safety…

WHO page on food safety

Foodlink

The FDA’s Playing it Safe with Eggs

Eat Your Vegetables

I am curious as to whether anyone has published any succinct advice for people who are transitioning from the Kimkins WOE to something better. I know that Jimmy Moore repeatedly welcomed all comers to his free forum and I suspect that there is a lot of detailed discussing about tweaking diets there.

I am not a dietitian or even an experienced dieter. The best advice I can offer is that vegetables are our friends. About.com has a convenient list of vegetables in listed in order of carb count. I know that it is the middle of the winter in the northern hemisphere now, so price and quality aren’t optimal for some of the better vegetables. I would suggest that you take a relatively long ‘wish list’ to the grocery store and take home what is of good quality and a reasonable price.

Serious Curiosity About Low Carb Diets

There is a very broad spectrum with regard to curiosity in human beings. We have to assume that any people who have joined Kimkins in the past several months are not very curious. If they were curious, they would have done a teeny bit of research and found out about all the negatives.

I am very curious. I am so curious that I just went to the trouble of registering at the New England Journal of Medicine so that I could look at the articles about research into Low Carb Diets. The first one that I read sums up a very large study of over 80,000 women that found that low carb dieting did not increase the risk of coronary heart disease. Low-Carbohydrate-Diet Score and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Women was published in 2006. My free registration only allows me to view the full text of studies that are over 6 months old.

One interesting aside is that data from nurses that submitted reports of less than 500 calories per day were excluded from the study because the data was considered implausible. 3500 calories was considered implausibly high.

Kimkins Model Cloned

I am not going to link to the site that is being labeled as a clone of Kimkins. I will link to a page on a site that connects freelance sitebuilders to customers. The fact that the owner of the domain in question is asking for someone to clone Kimkins is confirmation of what the site is. Don’t worry, they didn’t clone Heidi. And even if they did, research has shown than personality is only about 50% genetic.

I am 99.9% sure that the site is in no way connected to Heidi Diaz.

The Fear of Doctors

When the validity of the original Kimkins diet was still being aggressively defended, the assertion that members were advised to consult with their doctor was hailed as a panacea that should sanitize the internet of all doubts about the plan. After everything that has come out at this point I am legitimately worried that some individuals may have incurred real harm from this way of eating and that they have not yet and may not ever consult with a doctor about their problems. For one thing, health care systems are in various states of disrepair in many countries and for another thing, some people have a crippling irrational fear of doctors. When the idea came to me that Kimkins survivors might be avoiding professional health care, I did a quick bit of research. I found out that the fear of doctors is a serious and prevalent problem. I also found some websites that claim to be able to cure the phobia. I don’t know if they are legitimate.

Chicken

I am on holiday in Italy and I took this picture at a market.

Chicken is a part of the human diet in most parts of the world. The production of chicken and also eggs in the USA is a very streamlined and efficient agribusiness. I saw a documentary years ago that said that TYLER owned just about all the chickens in the country and that farmers were basically subcontractors.

I couldn’t help but notice that a recent promotion from the egg marketing board featured lots of happy farm families in golden lighting handling eggs. The 30 second television commercial did not feature a single frame showing a chicken. The animal welfare and animal rights people could not accuse them of presenting a false or misleading picture of the chickens that lay your eggs.