The Quackometer

The louder a food screams 'natural' or 'healthy' at you, the further you should run. That is the somewhat counter-intuitive message of Michael Pollan's essay, Unhappy Meals. Pollan tells us to avoid those food products that come bearing loud health claims.

Labels: diets, Holland and Barrett, Patrick Holford, vitamins

 

In this story, a supplement industry spokesperson resorts to Creationist 'Science' for their evidence to support the 'crucial' nature of supplement pills, shows how we should eat like Inuits, without the messy business of catching fish (or dying young), and has a pop at one of the UK's most respected academics when he dares to point out some herbal gobbledegook.

A quackometer refrain is that where you find people saying that you cannot get the nutrients you need through diet, you will find a supplement pill pusher. And a new pill pusher has come to light this week: Dr Ann Walker, spokesperson for the Health Supplements Information Service (HSIS), a body set up to be an,

educational programme to present facts about health supplementation in a simple, a straightforward way. We aim to empower consumers with knowledge about nutrients and their crucial role for a healthy living.

Crucial, eh? Given that the HSIS is made up of many large and small business that try to flog nutripills to us, then we might expect strong marketing language. Why take those disgusting little pills if they were not crucial?

So what evidence are we given for the 'crucial' nature of supplements? How does the science stack up and should we rely on such evidence? Let's see what Dr Walker has to say on the subject.

But first a bit of background: Dr Ann Walker looks like a busy person. As well as work with the HSIS, she runs a herbalist training school with her husband, has her own herbalist private practice open twice a week, and still finds time to supervise studies in Human Nutrition in the Hugh Sinclair Unit of Human Nutrition at The University of Reading.

However, the one of Britain's most eminent scientists, Professor David Colquhoun FRS, has pointed out that Dr Walker's association with the University counts as about one tenth of a full time job. He also commented that she signs herself as a Senior Lecturer at Reading when trying to comment on the negative effects of supplements without declaring her interests as a spokesperson for the industry. The straw on the camel's back was exposing her herbalist web site as touting 'gobbledygook' when it suggests that Red Clover is a 'blood cleanser'. The term has no scientific meaning. All this resulted in Dr Walker's husband complaining to the Provost of University College London about Professor Colquhoun and his web site. The complaint alleged defamation and breach of copyright. Ann and her husband had not complained to Professor Colquhoun directly and had not answered his request for them to explain what a 'blood cleanser' was and why this was not gobbledygook.

Threatening legal action and complaining to the University without addressing David directly is a bit unsporting. Why would you do this if your views on herbal treatments stood up to examination? A simple email to David, pointing out his errors, would surely suffice? The fact that this has not happened rings alarm bells. And so, I felt it worthwhile looking at some of the other claims that Dr Ann Walker makes to see if they too support the popping of supplement pills.

Dr Walker writes articles for the Healthspan web site, which claims to be the 'largest home shopping supplier of vitamins and supplements in the UK. Tax free prices. Free P&P (UK)'. Her articles for the site are linked to various supplements and give reasons why purchasing such products are 'crucial'. I am going to pick on the first article in her list and see if it contains good reasons to buy a supplement or two.

The article is entitled 'Did cavemen get arthritis?' and is an attempt to explain why we should be buying Omega-3 and Vitamin D pills. It starts off,

We often hear that the ideal diet to prevent all chronic diseases, including arthritis, is the Stone-Age Diet, which was believed to be based on the meat of hunted animals and the leaves, roots, seeds and fruits of gathered wild plants. Did the ancient Stone-Age diet really combine the best features of what we now call healthy eating? In this article, the links between evolution, nutrition, dietary change and arthritis are explored in relation to archaeological evidence.

It is not clear where we can hear that diet can prevent all chronic diseases. This sort of claim is typical of nutritional therapists and is highly controversial, mainly because there is little evidence for it.

Dr Walker continues,

The earliest known case of human arthritis was found in a cave at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France in 1908. It was the bent-over frame of a Neanderthal Old Man, who lived 60,000 years ago. His ape-like spine was responsible for the myth that the Neanderthals were one of the missing links in human evolution. But subsequent finds suggest that they were regular humans who just looked a little different from us and that their skeletal deformities were due to diet.

The specifics of the dietary problems are explained as follows:

During the Ice Age, Neanderthals lived in dark caves and probably suffered from vitamin D deficiency due to a lack of sunlight. Hence, if their diet was low in fish, they not only missed out on its rich vitamin D content, but also on its omega 3 fatty acids, with consequent risk of the development of soft, deformed bones and arthritic joints.

The first word that springs out here is 'myth'. Now, the question of whether Neanderthals are our evolutionary ancestors, or our cousins, or even hybrids, has been the subject of much debate and research, But to call it a 'myth' is a bit odd. The next bit is even stranger. Dr Walker claims that subsequent finds now prove that Neanderthals were just plain old humans, maybe a little odd looking, but with dietary problems. Specifically, a lack of Vitamin D would have caused rickets and deformed their bones.

These sorts of arguments about Neanderthals are quite common on the web. However, you will not find them on science web sites but on web sites displaying the rantings of creationists and so-called Intelligent Design advocates. These arguments are important to the creationists. The existence of Neanderthal bones, along with fossils from other homo species, are excellent evidence that archaic forms of humans existed, quite distinct from ourselves, and that evolution can explain their development from earlier, more ape-like ancestors. This is bad news for creationists who like to pretend that no such 'missing links' exist. And so the dissemblers on such sites paint these bones as those of diseased normal humans. A good example of the type of argument can be found on the All About Creation web site. The phrasing and style of argument displayed here is remarkably similar to Dr Walker's site.

The idea that Neanderthals were deformed and diseased ordinary humans has a long heritage, going as far back as the 19th Century German Anatomist Rudolf Virchow, who examined the skeleton of a Neanderthal and pronounced it a victim of rickets and a good bludgeoning around the head. By the beginning of the 20th Century, such ideas had been proved to be nonsense and now they are only to be found on christian literalist web sites (and the odd vitamin sales site).

We now have a much better view of what the Neanderthals were. Far from being backward, diseased and brutish, our cousins were in fact highly successful colonisers of Europe and the Near East. They thrived for hundreds of thousands of years and their remains have been associated with complex hunting and tool making, control of fire and cultural artifcats. Whereas the later arriving sapiens adapted to the harsher environments of Europe though technology, Neanderthals survived through physical adaptions. Their bodies were not diseased but strong and stocky in order to conserve heat and hunt effectively. Their bodies show no signs of rickets. Rather than having the grossly weakened and twisted bones of a rickets victim, their bones are 50% stronger than ours and show none of the usual symptoms of the disease. Why they finally died out, and our own ancestors survived, is still being hotly debated as more evidence comes to light. However, it might be worth noting that the natural assumption that modern humans were far superior in their adaptions for the modern world may yet turn out to be hubris. Neandethals may yet turn out to have a longer dominion over their world than we do.

To further the idea that we will become more Neanderthal like if we don't take our Vitamin D and Omega-3 pills, Dr Walker goes on to more theories about fish oil in the diet of earlier humans. She says that intakes of "vitamins, minerals and phyto-chemicals, such as flavonoids, would have been much higher than today" and this may have made possible brain growth. It is not clear why she believes this.

But, in support of at least part of this, she cites the work of Professor Michael Crawford who published a theory in a 1989 book that early humans would have had to eat large quantities of seafood in order to get enough omega-3 for brain growth. This idea has been incorporated into what is known as the aquatic ape theory, an interesting but controversial idea that early human evolution must have gone through a phase where our ancestors lived in water. The theory is supposed to explain various odd human features such as our ability to hold our breath and swim and our nakedness. The aquatic ape theory has not gained acceptance as so many of the features the theory tries to explain can be explained in other ways. In similar ways, the fish-eating ape theory of Michael Crawford has been argued to be unlikely. John Langdon recently published a paper in the British Journal of Nutrition that reviewed the literature to see what support there may be for the theory and found that there was probably no need for an extreme fishy diet.

Dr Walker goes on,

There seems to be little doubt that many current health problems result from a mismatch between our genetically determined nutritional requirements and our modern diet. According to numerous studies, the Stone-Age diet, high in fruit, vegetables and fish, is still the best for modern humans to reduce their risk of
chronic diseases

So, far Dr Walker has given us little to convince us of the idea that chronic problems such as arthritis are due to our deviation from a stone age diet. Indeed, the leap to the 'crucialness' of taking supplement pills is even more absent. Why not just advise people to have a diet high in the food stuffs our ancestors ate?

Finally, Dr Walker says,

Interestingly, glucosamine and chondroitin (now widely used as supplements to reduce the symptoms of arthritis) are both sourced from marine life. The health benefits of seafood may explain why Greenland Inuits have one of the lowest rates of arthritis in the world.

This article is getting far too long now to look into the glucosamine and chondroitin claim, so I am happy to pass over to Coracle on Science and Progress to see what weight this bears. However, Dr Walker tries to convince us that Inuits have low levels of arthritis and this may be caused by a high fish diet. However, others think that such disparities, if they truly exist, may well have genetic components. It is also worth noting that Canadian Inuits have a life expectancy 10-15 years lower than the average Canadian. Whilst there are many factors that will play a role in this, it has been noted that the Inuit diet must have one the lowest intakes of fresh fruit and vegetables in the world.

The whole hypothesis that our caveman ancestors had superb diets that we can only emulate by buying supplements from Dr Walker's sponsors must be ridiculous. Today's western consumer has access to year round fresh fruit and vegetables, a constant and predictable supply of grains, meat, fish, dairy products and jaffa cakes, and almost never goes through periods of shortages or restrictions. Diets do go wrong, with people eating too much, or eating in an unbalanced way. But, supplements are not the answer, in most cases. Daft tabloid dietary advice, nonsense from media nutritionists, fads and scare stories all confuse people into believing organisations like Dr Walker's marketing firm. Articles, like this Neanderthal one, are not helping.

Ironically, Dr Walker might be nearer the truth of advocating a Neanderthal lifestyle when she is promoting her herbal remedies. Human beings have a long tradition of using plants in therapeutic ways and this undoubtedly goes back into our prehistory. As our ancestors evolved, so their brains got better at fathoming causal relationships in the world. Tools and technology are the consequence of brains that can accurately model cause and effect relationships. To those emerging human minds, the instinct to find causal reasons for disease and to take action to cure must have been strong. After all, humans can influence and manipulate so much of their world, why not their bodies and their illnesses? It is interesting to speculate how humans' love of quackery comes from those primitive instincts and how our minds still seek patterns and explanations in illness. Is herbalism deeply rooted in our evolutionary past?

Did Neanderthals use herbs to heal? Tantalisingly, there is some evidence from a grave in Iraq. Maybe, our relationship with plants is even deeper than the Neanderthals. Last Christmas, I had the pleasure of meeting a researcher who was off to Borneo to study how Orang-Utans maybe self-medicated with various plants. She was going to be collecting Orang pooh for six months and studying it, and was obviously destined to become the Gillian McKeith of the Orang-Utan world. But with an accredited PhD. And even more matted ginger hair.

But to fall for the alluring idea of the 'wisdom of the ancients' and their 'natural' healing powers would be missing what was going on here. Maybe, some plants had a therapeutic effect. Maybe, the action of a social group using plants gave a strong placebo response in the ill. As we find today, many illnesses would be fought off by an immune response or be self-limiting in some other way. The act of healing rituals cemented social bonds and the plants used formed part of the groups' defining cultures. There is evidence that Neanderthals cared for their sick and elderly, however, the value of using plants in healing was probably more cultural and social than pharmaceutical.

We scientific humans, however, have developed skills that allow us to work out which plants really have beneficial effect, and we have technologies that allow us to refine the chemicals that cause the effect, how to minimize risks and side-effects and how to standardise doses. It's called modern, scientific medicine. Dr Walker's herbalism has more in common with our ancestors shamanic rituals than with what goes on in hospitals. If there is good evidence for the beneficial effect of a herb then it ceases to be herbalism and becomes part of the tools of real medicine. This does happen, of course. The majority of drugs now used have their origins in plants and other natural substances.

However, Dr Walker appears to be more rooted in our Neanderthal past using mystical and non-scientific explanations for herbal remedies. Professor Colquhoun was quite right to point out that using terms like 'blood cleanser' is just gobbledegook. Fortunately, I have just heard that his web site will be re-instated on the UCL servers and that the university consider the meat of the complaint groundless. So much for legalistic threats. Can we get back to the science now please?

So, why did Neanderthals not get arthritis? Was it fish oil? Is this the answer?

Perhaps, it had something to do with the probable life expectancy of a Neanderthal being just 20 years.


-

Labels: diets, nutritionist, pseudoscience, vitamins

 

It's been a bad week for Gillian. The anti-quackery blogging brigade have been partaking in bouts of the great British pastime of uncontrolled Schadenfreude (why did we leave it to the Germans to coin that term?) after the Advertising Standards Authority stopped Gillian McKeith as advertising herself as 'Dr Gillian'. The Guardian printed a huge article by Ben Goldacre about how she is a 'Menace to Science' and how her particular brand of nutrionism is deeply anti-science and harmful.

Is there anything else left to say on the subject? One thing that Ben and Gillian's defenders have in common is their belief that, in many ways, it is immaterial by what title she calls herself. Obviously, her use of the title offends the many hardworking PhDs who have sweated and slaved to use their title in order to try to secure upgrades at airport check-ins. But if her advice leads to people eating more sensible diets then surely 'all's well that end's well'? That would be fine. But Gillian just speaks nonsense at people. Her thoughts on chlorophyll and food colour have been well addressed as non-scientific silliness. If people take her seriously, then how do they know what is good advice and what is rubbish? Therein lies the problem.

My contribution to the debate is going to be to show just how deep her embrace of anti-science is. I don't think even Ben has described just how far she is prepared to go. She does not just embrace the language of science in a pseudoscientific way, but is also quite prepared to get into bed with a deep anti-science agri-woo in order to sell her products. Let's just look at one of her products for sale on her web site: Veggie Vitality, available in 200ml quantities for £1.79. Her description reads...

Labels: Ben Goldacre, diets, Gillian McKeith, homeopathy, nutritionist, organic quackery

 

Regular listeners to BBC Radio 4's Womans' Hour will have recently heard nutritionist Suzi Grant extolling the virtues of so-called superfoods. Quackery, I say.

Labels: Ben Goldacre, diets, mckeith, nutritionist, Quack Words, qualifications, vitamins

 

Happy new year to you all. I've been off for my Christmas break and I am now attending to my post bag and I thought I would share a few gems with the world.

First, I am always up for a challenge and so when writer Geoff Freed starts off his email "You pure miserable person", I know I am in for a treat! When Geoff adds "I bet you would not have the guts to print this" I really have no alternative!

This is really my point. Sounds like nice science about how some plants may defend themselves from fungus, but now we have a long string of what-ifs and maybes to get to the mass supplementation of the public with a pill. Whatever trials are currently being done, the results are not in and yet and in the meantime these companies are marketing products as if it is a done deal. As with my first correspondent, there are many good ideas out there and loads of laudable intentions. However, not all those ideas are good - in fact the majority end up on the dustbin of discarded science, no matter how much we wish them to be true.

As Guy correctly states, the best evidence for salvestrols as a cancer/cure prevention is largely anecdotal - a few doctors with case histories. Guy says,

It is not true that all anecdotes are nearly worthless. Some are; some are not. It depends on the source of the evidence.

Labels: dax moy, diets, nutritionist, salvestrols

 

Le Canard Noir has a hectic international life, flitting around the world in luxury, from hotel to beach, from fine restaurants to top spas. And all I have to do is occasionally blog from wherever I can get WiFi access. Such are the benefits of being a Big Pharma shill. (Keep the cheques coming in - my stocks of champagne are getting low for Christmas).

However, yesterday was a little more mundane with a 4am foggy dash to Luton for the first easyJet flight to Edinburgh. A quick meeting there, and then back in the afternoon. So, in my caffeine starved, befuddled and yawning state, I had found myself flicking through the easyJet in-flight magazine. Something I usually avoid, but I was late and had to run past the magazine shop to board the plane. I was going to do my Xmas shopping in the duty free shop, but that will have to wait now til Saturday.

Now I was not expecting investigative journalism, insightful political analysis or even peer-reviewed papers. No, I would have been happy to read about some groovy bars in ski resorts, boutique hotels in city break destinations and even flick through the vanity surgery adverts and pictures of expensive villas in Mallorca (do I really need another one?) What I was confronted with was a shed load of quackery. Astonishing amounts for one small in-flight magazine.

Let me give you some highlights...

• Top tips on avoiding a cold. Dubious vitamin C advice, superfoods (aarrrggh), and my real pet hate - drink at least 2 litres of water per day.


• A new concept of 'Wine Therapy'. Apparently wine contains lots of essential 'pure essences' and 'natural ingredients'. A new spa has opened up to exploit the curative properties of wine - the Caudalie Vinotherapie Spa near Bilbao.


• A review of the 'Bliss Energy Mask'. Some sort of facial stuff that has vitamin C and a 'shot of oxygen'. Marvelous.


• Top tips for healthy skiing, including laying off the cheese (is that possible in the Haute Savoie?)


• One of those standard 'Surviving Christmas' articles including great advice from a Boots the Chemist nutriquack and a reflexologist.


• Stress relieving tips including taking herbal supplements and Bach Flower Remedies.


• Hangover remedies from around the world - placing parsley on your head and eating marinated fish is the thing, apparently.

and my favourite,

• The amazing benefits of inhaling copious amounts of smoke in an Estonian Smoke Sauna. Don't forget to thwack yourself with birch branches too.

So, is there any harm in this? Directly, I doubt it. At worst, a lot of the advice is pretty soulless and is just missing the point of having a good ski holiday or a weekend in a spa drinking wine. Even inhaling smoke in a sauna is unlikely to be that bad and the invigorating experience of the sauna is going to be stress relieving and fun. Indirectly though, the trotting out of old canards about drinking loads of water and the thinking that vitamins in cosmetics is a good idea, just adds to the noise of uncritical and lazy health advice in the media.

For me, what this represented was just the depressing reality of the mainstream acceptance of the views of reflexologists as being valuable, the acceptance of the pseudoscience of oxygen rich facial creams being unchallenged, and the need to subvert life affirming activities, such as skiing, spas and saunas with meaningless health advice.

It is just low cost journalism for a low cost airline. I guess with everything else on these low cost airlines, we mustn't grumble.

Labels: detox, diets, journalists, nutritionist

 

A regular comment to me is to ask "why have I got it in for Nutritionists?" Surely, these are dedicated health professionals who do wonders for peoples' health by improving their diets and making sure people take the right supplements, if required. Well maybe. The problem is that so many nutritionists are not doing this and often resort to pseudoscience and quackery. This week's Quack Word blog entry will argue that the Quackometer is quite right (most of the time) in scoring highly a web page with the word 'nutritionist' in it.

So, a quick definition of 'nutritionist'. Whilst one should always take wikipedea articles with a sceptical eye, their definition of nutritionist is a good starting point:

A nutritionist is a person who advises people on dietary matters relating to health, well-being and optimal nutrition. Nutritionists should not be confused with dietitians. Dietitians are health care professionals who have received specialised formal accredited tertiary education and training, and undertake internship in hospitals, and who are required to adhere to their regulatory body's code of conduct. They are also the only non-medically-trained health-care professionals permitted to practise clinically in hospitals or health-care facilities. Many "nutritionists" appear on television, in newspapers and magazines, and write bestselling nutritional books.

Self-identified nutritionists have varying levels of education, and can be someone with little education up to someone who may have the equivalent of a master's degree in Physiology or Biology.

• It's not just about eating healthily. Bad diet is promoted as being the root cause of almost all diseases and conditions. Eating in a certain way can restore the 'balance'.


• It is not possible to get all your vitamins and minerals from food today because of modern farming methods. The nutriquack can sell you the right supplements.


• Organic is healthier.


• Claiming that a simple change of diet or popping a vitamin cure complex social issues, like omega-3 fish oil pills helping poorly performing kids in schools,


• Promoting radical diets which usually involve cutting out entire food groups.


• Promoting the health benefits of consuming huge volumes of vitamins.


• Advocating 'superfoods' that allegedly have remarkable health benefits.


• Obsessions with discredited and weird diagnostic techniques, such as examining stools.


• They use pseudoscience to sound knowledgeable. Talk of 'detoxification' is common.


• Selling weird made up foods with remarkable properties such as this nonsense salt seller and shrouding it in ridiculous claims.
  

All these things have in common is their overstatements and lack of evidence. Making health claims in this way is quackery. From now on, I will call such people the nutriquacks.

I think the problem of the nutriquack arises from the simple fact that good nutritional advice (for most people) is quite simple - eat a balanced, varied diet with a low amount of fat and lots of green stuff. You are not going to make a fortune with that mantra - even though getting people to follow it is quite hard sometimes. By making the whole thing appear more complicated though, the nutriquack is creating a market for their services. You cannot get enough antioxidants - my superfood berries (available on my website) will do it for you though! Register with my site, complete my questionnaire and I will personally compose your optimum nutrition plan and supplement mix. And so on.

What is happening is that nutriquacks are fetishising food and bamboozling people. Rather than enjoying food for its own sake, many people are led down the path of analysing everything they put in their mouth, jumping to conclusions about why they might be overweight or unwell and fruitlessly giving money away to people who do not deserve it. The real heroes of healthy eating for me are those people who try to instill a love of good food into people. Chefs and writers who try to excite about the benefits of buying good ingredients, how to source fresh ingredients inexpensively, how to be creative in the kitchen without needing top-chef skills and basically try to impart a joy about food. That is surely the route to people having a good, healthy relationship with their food and so end up getting a more rounded, varied and balanced diet. People like Jamie Oliver, Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson spring to mind, but there are many more. These people do not resort to pseudoscience in order to justify what they do.

When science does make some well researched discoveries about the food we eat, this is often drowned out in the swamp of nutriquack baloney. It is often impossible to tell good science from nonsense in the popular press and TV. All this does is make people despair of the 'scientists' with their constantly contradictory advice and silly discoveries. It undermines a reliable source of knowledge for society that genuinely could help improve peoples' lives.

Nutriquacks operate in a legal void. Selling food is not illegal after all and vitamins and minerals are just food. However, make medical claims and use ingredients that might be medicinal in nature and you might end up in hot water. At least this is a curb on the excesses of nutriquacks, although it is seldom invoked.

However, such is the fate of arch-nutriquack 'Dr' Gillian McKeith. Today, the MHRA (the British organisation that is supposed to control the use of medicines) has ordered that McKeith stop selling illegal products. McKeith has been capitalising on her TV fame by selling all sorts of expensive and silly 'superfoods' to her fans. At last, the law has caught up with her, at least in a little way and she will have to re-think how she goes about her business now.

Labels: Ben Goldacre, detox, diets, Gillian McKeith, minerals, nutritionist, Quack Words, vitamins

 

UPDATE 8th February 2007

Well, six months after first posting this entry, the complementary IT team at Dr Wendy's support organisation have made a few spelling corrections. I thought this might happen soon, as this entry became the most widely read entry on the site. I guess it was being passed round a bit - thousands of times.

So, it looks like, after much speculation, Wendy's services are not complimentary, or free, but indeed complementary. Looks like the team also believes the word 'complementary' deserves capitalising, whereas 'medicine' does not. Read into that what you may. Anyway, for posterity, the wayback machine has preserved the original site here. And you can compare it with now.

******************************************************************

I've just had a comment pointing out that Dr Wendy Denning only scores 1 Canard on the quackometer. Strangely, I had just flicked over to her new Channel 5 series, "The Diet Doctors".

The person leaving the comment said that Dr Wendy deserved a much higher score. In addition, anyone describing themselves as a 'nutritional expert' also needs a good look over just to see what quackery they are up to. (More on that in later blogs). Dr Wendy was also apparently responsible for pushing that useless Christmas-cracker piece of tat, the QLink pendant, on the poor, hapless Daily Mail reporter, Sarah Stacey, who wrote the all time highest scoring newspaper quack article ever. Also, Dr Wendy got her nutritional qualifications from Patrick Holford's Richmond based, made-up college, the Institute of Optimum Nutrition.

So, I decided to investigate a little further. Why had the Quackometer scored Dr Wendy so low?

Well, I found the answer rather quickly and it has opened up a whole new field of organic broccoli for the quackometer to sort out. It appears that Dr Wendy is not into complementary medicine (medicine that complements real medicine) at all. Her web site tells us that she is into complimentary medicine - repeatedly - some seven times at least. Is that going around paying her patients compliments and saying how nice she thinks they would look in her green jacket? Or does complimentary mean she is giving away her nuggets of 'holistic' medical wisdom for free?

Apparently, No. A quick check of her web site reveals she charges £225 for 90 minutes in her clinic, of which, she will guarantee to show up for half-an-hour, obviously to pay all the right compliments to you for handing over your credit card.

So, the answer is obvious. The quackometer only scores those practitioners into complementary medicine. Those who just pay flattering tributes to their patients do not deserve scores on the quackometer.

An insight to quacks then. To get around the quackometer, the answer is simple. Spell everything wrong. Learn a tip from the email spammers: e.g. _V_I_A_G_R_A. Just how many spelling variations of osteopathy, acupuncture and gullible can you come up with?

It looks like I am faced with a big task. To catch the Dr Wendys of this world I am going to have to expand the quack dictionaries enormously with every possible spelling variant. Hell. There is so much good telly I am going to miss over the next few weeks.

Ho Hum.

Just what do they teach them at medical school these days?

Labels: diets, nutritionist, qlink

 

The news (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) has been full of reports about how our food in Britain is becoming less nutritious and that it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain a full set of minerals and vitamins through the food we buy in supermarkets. I have been told by several people that this is the reason why it is so important to take supplements. Can this be true? If so then it is truly shocking! We can no longer feed ourselves! What is going on here?

I've always thought that the best way to get your minerals and vitamins was to eat a varied and balanced diet, rather than take dietary supplements. I further believe that the major source of information about the need to take supplements comes only from the big business interests behind the 'health fraud' industry.

So I did some digging. The common source behind these allegations of Mineral Depleted Food appears to be a report issued by the Food Commission. Let's take a look at this.

First, the Food Commission is a consumer lobby group involved in doing consumer surveys and publishing 'thought leadership'. It does not in itself publish peer-reviewed research. Like all such groups, it has an agenda, and one that I probably broadly agree with. Nonetheless, given this, one should always be cautious in examining its claims.

The report in itself suggests that several foods (meat and dairy) have lower levels of minerals than the same foods had in the 1920s. There are several problems with this analysis:

• If this is indeed true, there is nothing in this report to suggest that the levels have fallen to dangerous levels. Is it still likely that a varied and balanced diet will supply most peoples' needs? The report declines to comment.
• There have been several criticisms of the methodology of this research (comparing government tables, the best part of a century apart). Analytical methods have changes enormously over this time and there is no correction for biases that will have been introduced as a result. (Remember the famous iron-in-spinach myth?)
• The report goes on to show that 8% of women might be mineral deficient but (this is the important bit) the report does not say that this is a result of the (alleged) lower mineral levels in food. This could be down to these women just having very poor diets. This is to be expected, as we know some people do not eat well and there is no attempt to correct for this. This is either a little disingenuous or just plain not rigorous enough. The report allows the connection to be made in the readers mind - but does not state the connection itself.

So, not very convincing then. So what else does the Food Commission say on this subject then? Interestingly, it also publishes a report on vitamin and mineral fortification in diets (as promoted by many major brands, e.g. Nestle) and goes on to widely condemn the practice. One of the key findings in this report is that such practices are a subject of concern since it "promote[es] the concept of added nutrients as improving health, versus promotion of an overall healthy diet." In other words, the Food Commission says that you should eat a healthy diet; don't rely on added supplements.

It would appear to be case closed, but the story gets a lot better.

Why did the Food Commission publish this report? Who did the original research?

It is stated that the research was done by a Dr David Thomas. Now Dr Thomas was originally a geologist (alarm bells) and has "retrained as a chiropractor and nutritionist" (very loud sirens). Dr Thomas does not work at any academic institution doing research, as you might have thought given the seriousness of this report, but rather has been running a company that sells (drum roll) mineral supplements.

http://www.mineralresourcesint.co.uk/about.html (have a look what the quackometer has to say about this site.)

So, could it be that this report was originally just a piece of puff marketing released by a company that would directly profit from people believing it? I don't know. If it is just marketing then it is a scandal. Obviously many people are worried about their health enough to invest lots of money in unnecessary supplements.

Personally, I think the next time you are tempted to blow twenty quid in a health food shop on unnecessary supplements, you should keep on walking down the high street until you find an Oxfam or Save the Children collector and pop that twenty quid in their collection tin. The added nutritional value that the money will provide to struggling farmers in truly undernourished parts of the world will greatly outweigh any marginal benefit those pills will bring you – IF you eat a varied, balanced diet.

Labels: diets, minerals, nutritionist, vitamins