Whole30 "Police" report

[Nina Vachková]

Hello guys, let me quickly introduce myself before I share what I am about to share with you.

My name is Nina, I am 31 years old, I am from Czech Republic, Europe, did my first Whole30 in 2011, since then I am a firm believer in the program, I support and spread the word everywhere I do. I met Hartwigs and Mel Joulwan on their trips to Prague a few years back, I blog on Paleoowl.com and I blog about health and nutrition for a living. I also work for a publishing company that published Czech translations of It Starts With Food/Well Fed/Whole30 books, I run the official Czech FB page for It Starts With Food/Whole30 and soon we will be launching and official Czech Whole30 blog I will be in charge of. I am known to be a "Whole30 Police" in my community, and very often I am hated for that, which I am okay with. Here is the problem I would like to share and ask the Team's opinion on:

Basically anybody can hashtag anything they want with #whole30 these days and it always makes me so angry and sad, but there is really nothing I can do about it (even though I tend to comment on those often). In my country, two restaurants were recently opened, that label their food Whole30. The first one is a small bistro with delivery in Prague, opened for almost a year now, the second is a brand new restaurant in a different city. They both label their food Whole30, on Instagram, Facebook and their individual websites. They MAKE money on using the Whole30 brand name, but the food they label as Whole30 is NOT Whole30 in many cases. For example - carrot cake labeled Whole30, scrambled eggs with almond flour bread, burger with paleo bun, lemonades sweetened with stevia, flax seed crackers. I am probably a pain in the butt for them because I am not able to keep my mouth shut and I always message them to fix that, to delete that hashtag and stop confusing people. Problem is that in our community, people still don't understand the basic rules and tend to change or alter the rules to suit their needs (hello, whole30 pancakes). There is nothing we can do for these people other than point them the right direction, but with those restaurants, I kinda feel like something needs to be done. They have a message board on Facebook full of comments like "You saved my Whole30 once again!" while there is a very high chance that they "saved their Whole30" with a paleo bread and stevia sweetened lemonade with carrot cake!

So I was wondering (this is probably more a Melissa question), is there anything we can do? I mean, these people make money on the Whole30 brand while they don't even know what Whole30 is (I know for sure that nobody from the bistro ever started or completed Whole30, I used to be friends with the owners and my brother works there as a chef, but he has no control over the labeling of the meals) and I think they are basically ruining the good name of Whole30 by what they do... I contacted them both a few times, they always seem to fix it only to make the same "mistake" a few days later.. Is there anything we/you can do legally? As one of the leaders of W30 community in my country, I just hate to see that and I wanna do something, but I don't know what. Some people say that I overthink this too much or am too passionate/emotional about this (well, maybe I am and I don't think that is a bad thing), but honestly, I am tired of reading things like "Whole30 doesn't work for me" from people in our online group, while I know they think eating paleo bread is okay on Whole30 because the restaurant says it's okay and why would they lie, right??? 

I hope this makes sense and is not very ranty... 

[jmcbn]

I get where you're coming from and feel your frustration, and this is why we encourage people to stick with official Whole30 sites/forums because it's literally impossible to police the many & varied FB groups, blogs, online forums, recipes sites etc out there. Unfortunately anybody can add any hashtag they like to any post they make and it's up to the individuals viewing those posts/recipes etc to determine whether or not that food is Whole30 compliant based on their understanding of the rules, and's it's good practice to get people reading labels to determine this. If they don't understand the rules or have a query of any kind then that's what the official sites are for.

Anyone blatantly using the Whole30 branding who is not affiliated or endorsed by Whole30 can of course be reported to HQ.