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…

Related posts:

1. Quack Word #12: ‘Organic’ I believe that organic food is a con, is not necessarily more healthy for you, tastes no different, and is damaging to the environment. There, I have got that off...
2. Organic Milk Is/Is Not Healthier Those of you paying attention will have seen the quackometer spot these two stories from the past few weeks in the Daily Mail: Organic milk ‘better for a healthy diet’29th...
3. Quack Word #39: ‘Superfood’ 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. But what on earth can be...

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.

Related posts:

1. Quack Word #39: ‘Superfood’ 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. But what on earth can be...
2. Alleged Victim of Oxford Nutritionist ‘Detox Diet’ wins £810,000 Barbara Nash is a nutritionist based near Oxford. Dawn Page was overweight and sought the advice of Nash. It is alleged she was put on a ‘detox diet’ which included...
3. Quack Word #3: ‘Doctor’ UPDATE 12/2/07 Congratulations to Ben Goldacre and the crew at Bad Science for getting Dr Gillian McKeith banned from using the title ‘Dr’. In today’s Guardian she is fully exposed...

Congratulations to Ben Goldacre and the crew at Bad Science for getting Dr Gillian McKeith banned from using the title ‘Dr’. In today’s Guardian she is fully exposed as a Menace to Science. The Advertising Standards Authority have agreed that her use of that cheaply acquired title is thoroughly misleading.

One down…

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

Yes, I know. This is surprising quack word, but let me explain.

I’m not really writing about the word ‘Doctor’ but about titles and qualifications in general. More specifically, it is about using titles and qualifications, however acquired, to provide a sense of authority to healing claims when sound evidence is lacking.

‘Trust me, I’m a Doctor.’

Quacks lack evidence for the effectiveness of their treatments or theories and so rely on a number of other techniques to convince you of their worth, including testimonials, anecdotes and baffling pseudoscience. However, one of the surest giveaways of quackery is the flaunting of titles and qualifications. The quack will proudly put ‘Dr’ before their name and ‘PhD’ afterwards. Normally, one or other of ‘Dr’ and ‘PhD’ will do. This is an ‘appeal to authority’. It is solely there to impress. The quack is setting themselves up as a respected authority on a subject and so there is no need to look any further at any real arguments or evidence in favour of what they are saying.

Now of course, evidence-based medicine, and science in general, is full of Doctors, PhDs, Professors and diplomas. The difference is that, in general, these titles are not always flaunted. Look at any scientific paper in a prestigious journal like Nature and you will see just names and no titles. The authority of the paper comes from the strength of the argument and the rigours of the experiment, not the qualifications of the authors.

Qualifications do count, of course. They are part of the apprenticeship of science. But once the years have past, they become increasingly irrelevant. Look at how doctors tend to revert back to Mr/Ms etc as they become more experienced and advanced in their careers. Their reputation for excellent work is what matters, not their past exam success.

If you are still not sure, why not try a little experiment for yourself? Next time you are in a book shop, go and visit the popular science section. It is probably quite small, near the back and you may need a shop assistant to help you. Now look at the books and see how many titles you can spot on the covers. Names like Richard Dawkins, Steven J Gould, Hawkins, Dennett, Penrose and Pinker ought to leap out. All luminaries in their fields, but not a qualification in sight. If you look inside at the brief biography, you may spot the odd professorship mentioned alongside their stated appreciation of their family. Their titles, qualifications and awards are insignificant in the face of their arguments. If you do find a title, it is likely to be of a little known author.

Now go back towards the front of the shop until you end up in the ‘Mind, Body, Health and Spirit’ section. This won’t be hard to find. It will be three to four times the size of the science section. In a bad bookshop, the science books might be mixed up with it. However, the actual useful contribution to human knowledge on those shelves will fit in a small shoe box. A waste of trees. Now look for qualifications. It won’t take you long. They will be printed in huge, silver, embossed letters on the spine and cover. Looking at the Amazon best sellers at the moment we see names like Dr Gillian McKeith Phd, Doreen Virtue PhD, Jeffrey E. Young PhD and Dr Wayne Dyer. If the author hasn’t got a title themselves, then they will get a forward written by someone who has and that will appear in big letters. Those embossed letters count for everything. Noel Edmonds is missing a trick here.

But surely these people must know what they are talking about? You can’t just lie about your qualifications?

Well, you don’t need to lie, but there are a number of ways of getting round the three to fours years of library work, fine tuning of experiments, paper writing, seminar giving, thesis writing, thesis re-writing, and tortuous examinations – all on a pittance of pay – that are the staple of postgraduate degrees, if you want to start earning big quack bucks fast.

Let us count the ways…

1. Swap Subjects
You could have mistakenly done all the hard work above only to find out that being a geologist does not make as much money a selling bucket loads of useless vitamin pills. I’ve written about this before. Even though you are now a nutritional ‘expert’ there is no need to make it clear that your PhD was in geology, economics or bongo playing. Flaunt those letters after your name!

2. Join a ‘New University’
The massive expansion in higher education in the UK, and probably elsewhere in the world, has resulted in a deluge of former polytechnics, colleges and furniture shops now calling themselves universities. Even better is that, in the mad dash to attract students and, hence attract funding, the hard subjects of physics and chemistry have been dropped due to the difficulty of persuading students to take them. Far better to offer courses in homeopathy, nutrition and Madonna. Set yourself up as Professor of Reiki Studies and bingo, you’re off.

3. Do a Cheap Correspondence Course through an Unaccredited American College.
This might involve a little work and at least cost you a fair amount of postage, but at least you will be able to defend yourself in a court of law that you are entitled to the letters after your name. Sometimes called the “looneyversities”, these institutions often dole out pretty useless awards for little more than a fee. Proper academic standards are rarely upheld and are not subject to academic review by the usual authorities.

Paul McKenna PhD sued a journalist for saying his doctorate was not real. I quote from the Guardian:

Central to the case is an article published in October 2003 headlined “It’s a load of doc and bull”, in which Lewis-Smith wrote that McKenna’s first PhD, awarded by La Salle university in Louisiana, was a sham. “I discovered that anyone could be fully doctored by La Salle within months (no previous qualifications needed),” he wrote, just so long as they could answer the following question correctly: ‘Do you have $2,615, sir?’” This followed a number of articles dating from 1997 in which, among ther things, the columnist calls McKenna a “non-doctor”, a “dildo” and compares him to Dr Crippen, the notorious murderer executed in 1910 for killing his wife.

In fact, La Salle university was not as it seemed: in late 1996 the former president, Thomas Kirk, admitted to the FBI that it was not officially accredited; the following year he was jailed for five years for fraud. McKenna told the court he knew nothing of the fraud when he enrolled for a doctorate in hypnosis in June or July 2005. While he admitted the revelation had “devalued” the qualification, he insisted he did not believe it rendered it “bogus”

The judge found in favour of Dr McKenna noting that “Mr McKenna was not, in my judgment, dishonest and, for that matter, whatever one may think of the academic quality of his work, or of the degree granted by La Salle, it would not be accurate to describe it as “bogus”. So there. The title ‘Doctor’ is not protected, meaning anyone can pretty much call themselves this. The quality of any degree behind the title is irrelevant.

Perhaps, the most celebrated case in the UK is that of Dr Gillian McKeith PhD. Her credentials have been scrutinised by a number of observers, including the Sunday Mail with an article entitled Is Channel 4’s latest food guru Dr Gillian really a Quack and a danger to our health? Perhaps the funniest analysis was done by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian who looked into her professional memberships that included the American Association of Nutritional Consultants (AANC). Dr Goldacre applied for the same membership for his recently deceased cat, Henrietta. It cost him just $60.

The qualifications of Dr Gillian have been well explored and I will give a reference shortly. It is fair to say though that she does have qualifications that everyone respects. They are in languages, business and marketing. All things she does very well and her education has obviously paid off.

Dr Gillian McKeith PhD is not afraid of legal challenges either, although sometimes they take a more ‘out-of-court’ route. If you Google “Dr Gillian McKeith PhD” you will find the following wording on the first page:

In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.

Fortunately for posterity, I know the page concerned. You can find it here. This page is essential reading for all Gillian fans.

4. Start your own Institution or University and award Yourself Titles and Awards
Arguably the hardest work, but it can have big payoffs. The main one being that you can charge other people to get similar awards.

This is most often done in the US. The Beatles guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, set up his own university so that lots of ‘research’ could be done on Transendential Meditation.

The UK has its own examples, including Patrick Holford BSc, DipION, FBant. Patrick is one of those people who you will have found in the Healthy Living section of the bookshop, in between ‘Angel Healing’ and ‘The Photographic Kama Sutra’. Patrick styles himself as the “leading spokesman on nutrition, food, environmental and health issues”.

Once again, Patrick’s BSc was in psychology, not nutrition. His significant qualification in health matters is the DipION awarded by the Institution of Optimum Nutrition which was set up as a ‘charitable and independent educational trust ‘ by none other than Patrick Holford himself. Hire a few rooms in some managed office space in Richmond, London and you can have an International Headquarters. Even better, get one of those new universities (say Luton) to accredit your course and you can expect a stream of fresh new students. Nevermind that the most recent official quality review of Luton (now Bedfordshire) concluded:

As a result of its investigations, the audit team’s view of the University is that: limited confidence can be placed in the soundness of the University’s current and likely future management of the quality of its academic programmes and the academic standards of its awards.

This has not gone too unnoticed. The Sunday Telegraph posted an article entitled “Is this the worst university in Britain?”.

The Institute’s philosophy is one of nutritional therapy, treating disease through what you eat, as highlighted by the quote on the front page of its web site:

“The Doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs, but rather will cure and prevent disease with nutrition”
Thomas Edison, c 1870

So Thomas Edison not only invented the light-bulb but was a pioneering nutritionist. It’s a shame that the rest of science has not yet caught up with his thinking and adopted this in the way we have adopted the lightbulb. Maybe it is because the lightbulb is based on sound science and is useful?

Does any of this matter? Well, people do take Mr Holford seriously. He has been associated with comments that Vitamin C is better than AZT in the treatment of AIDS, where the evidence for that has been very poor. This is burning issue in South Africa now where the Health Minister believes you can treat HIV with potatoes. Someone is dying there every two minutes of HIV and AIDS. Also, the general public take him seriously. He last came to my attention when researching the QLink trinket that is sold as a way to stop ‘harmful’ EMF disrupting your life energy thingumajigs. He sells them on his website and provides this most fantastic endorsement:

There are many gadgets out there promising to protect you from electromagnetic radiation and give your energy a boost. I’ve investigated many and did not find any stacked up. The one exception is Q Link. The scientific proof is deeply impressive and that’s why I wear one. I recommend you do the same.

So, all the other EMF pendants are quackery and nonsense, Patrick, except the ones you sell?Presumably, Patrick will be setting up an Institute of Optimum Quantum Physics as well now.

So why do the likes of Dr Gillian and Patrick see qualifications as so important to them? The key here is to see that they are both nutritionists and both sell food supplements of one form or another. The problem in selling these things is convincing people they need them; basic nutrition for most people is not hard. It’s common sense – eat a balanced and varied diet, eat your greens and don’t overindulge too often. Not much of a market for superfoods and vital supplements there. If, however, you make all this sound very complex, stress the importance of eating at an ‘optimum’, throw in some pseudoscience to make it sound like you know this stuff deeply, flaunt your qualifications and make it all sound too hard for the individual to keep track off, then you just might create a market for your overpriced alfalfa extract.

Dr Canard Noir Bsc(Hons.), PhD

Related posts:

1. Quack Word #16: ‘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...
2. York Shambles or, The Curious Case of Patrick Holford’s CV It was funny when ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith got slapped for using unaccredited qualifications to promote her quackery. However, it is now looking...
3. The Quest For The Perfect Quack! Well, I’ve had a bit of time to put some effort into the Quackometer, and now it has a few new features and improvements. 1. First – ‘Am I a...