Fact Check

Was a Zambian Man Arrested After Boasting He Lost 280 Pounds on a 'Cannibal Diet'?

Not a realistic way of losing weight, nor a method that's actually been tried.

Published May 14, 2018

Claim:
A man in Zambia was arrested after proclaiming he had employed a 'cannibal diet' to lose weight.

On 13 May 2018, the World News Daily Report (WNDR) web site published an article reporting that a man in Zambia had been arrested after proclaiming he had employed a so-called "cannibal diet" to lose a good deal of weight:

A Zambian man has been arrested by authorities after boasting on social media that he had lost 280 pounds by eating a “human meat-only” diet.

Mwamba Tembo, 43, claims he was overweight until his witch doctor advised him to go on a three-month human bone broth regime.

Tembo shared on social media his progressive weight loss, never divulging that he indulged in human bone broth until the end of his 3-month-long regime.

None of this is true. This story was fabricated by World News Daily Report, a fake news site whose disclaimer notes that the site's content is "fictional":

WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website — even those based on real people — are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.

The photographs accompanying the WNDR report were taken from a 2017 article about a Nigerian man who reportedly shared pictures showing off that he had shed hundreds of pounds, but with no mention of his achieving those results through a diet that included human flesh — which would probably have warranted at least a mention.

Sources

World News Daily Report.   "Zambian Man Arrested After Boasting He Lost 280 Pounds on ‘Cannibal Diet.’"   13 May 2018.

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.