This is an update of the previous post. The Diabetes.co.uk website moderator has now purged all my posts. To explain this he has declared that I was nothing but a troll whose purpose was to challenge the moderator and disrupt the discussion. Here is part of what he says:

“This thread has now been cleaned up and the posts and related responses from the Troll who only wanted to attack the Monitors and their personal way of doing things has been removed from this thread.”

You can find this on the thread titled: Viv’s Modified Atkins Diet in the forums at Diabetes.co.uk. It is interesting to note that Viv, the person who started the thread and, apparently a long-time participant in the forum, was so disgusted by the moderator’s behaviour that she announced that she has withdrawn from the forum. She had sent me private messages indicating that she agreed with my position.

The moderator had to remove my posts because anyone who took the time to read them would understand that the low-carb/low-fat diet he claimed to be eating and which he was promoting to others was, in fact, impossible to sustain. I had taken the information provided and broken down the macronutrients and calories to show that you cannot do both low-carb and low-fat while you are maintaining a stable weight. I had also described the recent studies which show that fat and saturated fat are not harmful when you eat a low-carb diet. If there is no need to avoid fat when you reduce carbs, a very low-carb diet becomes sustainable over the long haul. This is an important point because, if you fear fat, you will have to ramp up carb consumption once you stop burning off your body fat and, for most people, that means the weight and associated problems will return. So why would anyone not want to hear that message?

Okay – I’m not obsessing about this. Here’s my point. I had a closer look at the whole website. It looks, at first glance, like the official site of a national diabetes organization or perhaps even a government sponsored entity (have a look at Diabetes.org.uk, the national non-profit to see how similar the websites are). It is not. It is a for-profit commercial endeavour. It is run by people with no particular expertise in diabetes. The editorial team is comprised of a professional writer, a mathematician and a journalist. Their panel of “Diabetes Expert Contributors” consists of a diabetes educator, an author, a psychologist and a freelance journalist.

It appears that the whole purpose is to attract a large number of diabetics and expose them to advertising for profit. Here is what they say to their potential advertisers:

About Diabetes.co.uk

Diabetes.co.uk is an important and comprehensive online information resource. With a lively community of repeat visitors, and high search engine placement for key terms on all major search engine, Diabetes.co.uk provides an excellent route to reaching targeted traffic.

Our range of advertising options include the following:

Banners & skyscrapers, news features, mailshots, newsletter marketing, advertorial, features, competitions, reviews, directory entry and site sponsorship.

Got that? “News features” means product advertising masquerading as a news item. “Mailshots” – it looks like they will send advertising spam to the email addresses of their participants for a price. “Advertorial” means something masquerading as an editorial is actually designed to promote a product. “Reviews” means that an apparently objective review of a product is actually paid for and is designed to promote the product.

So now I have a better understanding of why their low-carb diet forum is only masquerading as a place where low-carb diet is promoted. As you will know from reading my posts and many of the comments on this site, if you do a proper low-carb diet you can get off your medications. If you are diabetic or have metabolic syndrome you can achieve normal markers without having to take multiple drugs. You can even stop testing your blood every day once you have stabilized on a sustainable long-term low-carb diet. Think of all the money saved on drugs and testing supplies that would represent. If the people on that site were to do that in droves, what would that mean to the advertisers of all those products?

In my back and forth with the moderator someone mentioned that they had had a problem earlier with “evangelicals”. I took that to mean that others like me, who understand how a low-carb diet works and who challenged the faux low-carb being promoted there, had made earlier attempts to participate. I also understood this to mean that they had been driven away.

Okay, maybe I’m obsessing a little. But it just galls the heck out of me to see vulnerable people being misled and taken advantage of like that. Buyer beware.