Money First, Your Health Last

Mike Adams is the Health Ranger.

With a Nome de Plume like that, it is tempting to just make fun of him. Nevertheless, that is the title that he claims for himself on a website sprinkled with pictures of him posing for the camera, a male model being at one with mother nature.

What is a Health Ranger, you ask? He would tell you that he strives to "educate people around the world on how to achieve and maintain peak human health." His efforts, he says, are purely altruistic, since he has no need of money because he is already a successful entrepreneur, having founded and running a software company.

Indeed, as one reads his personal site and his informational site, you find that he isn't selling any products except books. As a writer myself (a title that I admit needs no credentials except to claim the occupation for yourself, and to actually write), I was somewhat disbelieving of the number of works, both books and articles, written since 2001, that have his name on them. There are, besides uncounted articles on his website, 33 books with his name either as primary or as co-author on them. The reason he claims to be able to write so much is because his diet is so incredible that he has become a "superlearning machine".

It becomes tempting to take on every single claim he has. Everything is such a classic example of deceptive health claims that it seems almost like he's read "How to Spot Quackery" from Quackwatch and then put it into action. The thoroughness of his content boggles the mind. It's like the clearinghouse of bogus medicine. It's a little frightening, really. He urges his audience to avoid all MDs and western doctors and all prescriptions. It becomes clear while reading his site that he makes no exceptions, even for serious illnesses like cancer. Cancer, he claims, can be cured by diet, exercise, and being in the sun. What is even more frightening is that my friendly neighborhood oracle has revealed that all references to him online were positive and of a believing nature. It's high time to take this guy down.

The registration information for his health websites reveals the same email listed for registrant, admin, and tech contact though it is not his own name. This, in itself, is not so very unusual but is the sign of a small organization. What is slightly more disturbing is that it is out of Taiwan. The email contact domain was webseed.com.

When one goes to webseed.com they find that it is part of the network of Truth Publishing, who he is partnered with, and where one can purchase all of the books that he has authored and co-authored. A little more research reveals that Webseed is a software "tool for generating Web pages that improve search engine rankings and increase site traffic" (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/48221) created by Mike Adams, who is the president of Arial Software. Ahh, that software company of his. It turns out that Arial Software is an industry leader in mass email marketing software.

Mike Adams, the self appointed Health Ranger, is responsible for software that creates bogus content for webpages to increase hits and email spam. It appears he doesn't care so much for what he is stuffing down the gullet of your computer.

He has generated a huge amount of content through his websites and books. His claim is that " As the information flow accelerated, I was writing articles, books and reports at blinding speed. It was all coming out too quickly to type, in fact, so I started recording all my articles and books, and using a team of transcriptionists to convert my audio recordings into text."

His software, Webseed, "is designed to work like a mail merge engine for Web documents, creating search-phrase-targeted Web pages that contain natural text instead of the repeated keywords generated by conventional meta-tag tools." and "lets the user create high-density pages containing chosen phrases."

It is my contention that Mike Adams decided to put his own software to good use, not only by creating a website, but by actually writing books that he make a profit off of. The software doesn't do the actual writing. He or his "team of transcriptionists" have, in fact, written every word there. But it would not surprise me to find a number of sentences and phrases repeated throughout his works, strung together by subject. Perhaps it is entire paragraphs. There is a great deal of content that this can't account for, but I believe it is the foundation of his network of health fraud.

I will admit this: I haven't read any of his books. I don't have the time for the free ones. Even if I did I don't trust downloading something from one of his sites. And I don't care to give him money to read the ones he charges for. If I did, I could find that they were all written by a human. Based on their summaries, this wouldn't make them any less full of deceitful fear mongering.

Is he a healthy guy? If those are pictures of him, he looks to be. (BTW, there is no way he could get that body or the stats he's claiming without a whole lot of exercise to go with that diet of his.) But I don't believe he believes the stuff he is selling. It's just a scheme to make more money selling content.

(Just want to apologize for the long pause in posting. We ended up going out of town quite unexpectedly, just as I was digging into this interesting tidbit.)  ¶ 9:51 PM