UseYourBrainDiet.comFighting The Good Fight Against Diet Scams!

In a recent update to its advertising guidelines, social media giant MySpace changes the terms of what it deems acceptable as advertisement on its site, and products that make unsubstantiated health claims are specifically singled out. It appears My Space has had enough of those fad products and cheesy Photoshopped before and after pictures. For users of MySpace, who have been bombarded with such ads for a long time, this may come as a relief.

In the updated guidelines, it states that an advertiser within his or her ads must not "make any claim about a product or service (such as diet suppressant, wrinkle remover, or "guaranteed" results) unless it has been substantiated through research or surveys, and that support is publicly available via [their] MySpace profile or third party link from the ad". In this context, we take "support" in this case to mean to prove the efficacy of the product being promoted or link to a reputable site that does this.

It also states that ads must not "contain or imply inaccurate affiliation or endorsement" or "include CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS of any kind". So that should mean we’ve seen the end of "the Rachael Ray Diet" as well as others. It also specifies that the advertiser must not "use another person's or entity's trademark, service mark, slogan, logo, brand name, company name or other identifier unless such party grants prior permission or otherwise permitted by law" so that would rule out the "as seen on CBS or NBC". The intent of these guidelines, as it looks from our end, seems to be to protect legitimate institutions and individuals from being represented as promoting these products without their consent.

Undoubtedly responding to many customer complaints about having been ripped off because they missed something buried in the small print (or the no print in some cases) it states "Any advertiser page containing a transactional interface for the purpose of selling a good or service to the user must contain the full terms and conditions of the offer in an easily accessible manner."

We respect that MySpace has made this commitment to protecting its members by cleaning up advertisements and having quality standards that make advertisers accountable for representing bogus products. MySpace may lose a significant amount of revenue by prohibiting these types of Ads because it makes its money from the space it rents out. Those fad and scam products bought a significant amount of ad space, and without other advertisers willing to pay as much for that space… well you get the picture. We wanted to congratulate MySpace on taking the high road and hope that other sites and search engines will follow in their footsteps.

Read the new terms here.

We stumbled across this cool article on a site called The-F-Word.org. They caught and called the Acai craze early, but we somehow we missed them until now. We salute them.

Even though some of the links unfortunately no longer work (because the offending sites they call out have been since removed) the author’s investigation into Acai berry blogs and scams is pretty interesting. The comments were also interesting and also revealed a suspiciously familiar face… Jenny Conrad of the famous Jenny’s diet blog, or Ann’s diet blog! Yeah, apparently she goes by more than one name and has done the diet more than once!

Here she is in a couple of "her" blog(s):

• Jenny’s Diet Blog dot com
• Ann drops lbs dot com

Better yet, here's the actual stock photos that they used (and modified in adobe photoshop):

Amazing, isn’t it? How these scamsters managed to get away with this for sooooo long amazes me.

Ever catch someone in a lie and call them on it only to have them back up and change their story? Well take a look, it is hilarious to see how many fake diet blogs are right now have changed that miracle diet story from an amazing 30 pounds in 2 weeks to a pound a day or 60 pounds in 3 months. Before it was "the pounds easily melt away" and now it is "with a sensible diet and exercise". What they are doing (the smart crooks) is changing their fake testimonial to try to fit with something that is humanly possible so in case they get a knock on the door, they don’t get to go to jail.

So far, it’s not illegal to make a diet blog with an invented person as the spokesperson, and many people may be feeling like "everyone’s doing it" as new ones spring up. They aren’t even creative about it, that’s why they all follow the same basic formula, copying the original websites that did well with it. Those suggesting purchasing multiple products as a diet combo are most popular because the host of the site gets paid for selling... you guessed it... multiple products.

Why? Because there is huge money in the fad diet industry and almost any moron who can get a basic webpage up and can get a picture of the same person fat and skinny can make money. (This is in no way a suggestion to go into this industry as a career) It is our hope (and suspicion) that they will have to give it all back because their advertising messages were misleading to the public and many of their products, harmful if used as directed.