The Diabetes Reversal Diet That Spammers Brought Us

This Paleo diet variation is relentlessly promoted via internet blog comment spam from WiFi hotspots.

The diet appears to be a front for a Christian evangelical program of some sort. The diet's e-pamphlet says, "But the healing is from God the Source of all... Creator God intended you to live, eat and enjoy life. Love God and others."

If you fail as a movie director, why not become a medical researcher?

The Spirit Happy Diet is promoted by "filmmaker" Collin Camino, whose only movie credit is as director of the 2006 "Confessions of a Gangsta," reviewed on the Internet Movie Database thusly:

Out of all the low-budget trash movies I've ever seen, this one might be the one that most deserves its obscurity. I'm really not even sure it can be considered a movie.... disjointed ... difficult to follow .... audio too loud, too soft ... screen mostly dark .... blurred and poorly framed .... Now you might be able to really stretch it and suggest that the technique was done on purpose to make the viewer feel like they are seeing the action through the eyes of the narrator, who is drunk, high, and paranoid.... Personally, I didn't feel like there was any payoff whatsoever."

At least Camino is consistent: he adapts this unique disjointed, blurred and paranoid style to his activities in the health field also, it seems.

The fake PR contact

A press release for the Spirit Happy Diet lists a "Mary Sue Solomon" as contact, with an address on a nonexistent street in Los Angeles, "Wilheire Blvd." This could be a misspelling of the major Los Angeles street "Wilshire Blvd.," but there is no number 35 for that street, and if there were it would be in Santa Monica, not Los Angeles, and in a different zip code. The phone number given is 8 digits, not 7 or 10, and is preceded by a plus sign in the European fashion. The only information that is not fake is the website address, which is a WordPress.com blog, so the owner cannot be traced via whois or server hosting information.

The e-pamphlet

What is the Spirit Happy Diet? We'll tell you here. Since the $16 e-pamphlet is only 31 pages, and much of that is meandering and content-free, the diet is easy to describe in detail. Although a description of a diet, the words used to describe it, can be copyrighted, the diet system itself cannot be copyrighted (only patented), so we are free to reveal the entirety of the system here to Diet Choices readers.

Dr. Hari Sharma

For his explanation of what causes diabetes, Camino turns to a character named Dr. Hari Sharma, the author of a book called Freedom from Disease. Dr. Sharma is apparently a faculty member at Ohio State University, but he's definitely an oddball: He recently published research that found that traditional Indian music slowed the growth of cancer cells, while AC/DC's "Black on Black" caused cancer cell growth to accelerate.

Cause of Type 2 Diabetes: "Chloride Oxide" and Alloxan

Following Dr. Sharma, Mr. Camino blames type 2 diabetes on a glucose analogue called alloxan. Although alloxan can certainly induce diabetes, Mr. Camino claims that a "bleach" called "chloride oxide" is used in white bread products like Wonder Bread to make it white, and that this substance can turn into alloxan.