Tag Archives: gillian-mckeith

Food for thought

Posted on by

The old themes keep coming back here. We really need some startling new things to blog about. Still, here goes…..

A 14 or 15 stone 8-year-old seems to sparked a huge moral panic all by himself. The media keep showing this kid and getting really worked up about him. Oh my god! He’s obese! Government ministers have even opined on the question of whether he should be taken into care. (There was a case conference today that decided he coulld stay with his mum, for the time being and if she agrees to cut his weight and so on.)

Now, on the face of it, unless there is a lot more happening in his family, I can’t see that a fat child is really such an urgent cause for intervention. Does anyone have any idea of the kind of suffering that some kids go through, with no assistance from anyone? Has the care system suddenly become a much more favourable option than being overweight?

What is really depressing about this story is that “fat” kids often get bullied. Nothing special in the fat bit, though, kids get bullied for any behaviour or characteristic that the bullies define as an offence. Adults are not supposed to reward bullying, let alone join in and take it to another level.

I doubt if the worst child bully in the world could come up with anything like the public pillorying of the child and his family. If the kid was a criminal, the media wouldn’t be allowed to name him, let alone plaster his picture everywhere and publicly debate his weight and his family circumstances. This kid and his family aren’t harming anyone, except possibly increasing his chance of getting certain diseases. Can anyone seriously believe that an 8-year-old is not going to be damaged by this experience of being in the public eye?

But obviously, it’s more important for us to show our social cohesion by all joining together to condemn him and his mother.

(Scapegoat rituals are so bloody powerful… You would hope that rational people could move beyond them or at least use symbolic scapegoats, as the obviously wiser amd more humane people of the past did.)

His weight is probably bad for his health, but I can’t honestly see what concern that is of mine. I don’t have enough faith in nutrition to believe everything we are told about it anyway. I have my own beliefs about food and health but I would hardly demand that everybody eats what I eat or exercises as I do. I thought that human diversity was a crucial survival strategy for our species.

If it is now OK to attack everyone who doesn’t meet my moral and physical standards, I can see a dozen candidates a month due for public naming and shaming as people who shouldn’t be entrusted with kids. I would be only too happy to voice my opinions on their apperance, their intelligence and their weight. And, of course, my opinion is necessarily always right…..

My point is that I have a mass of personal prejudices, based on highly dubious aesthetic grounds. However, if I don’t like someone’s appearance or expression or voice or way of life, I don’t claim any right to impose my standards on them. This is pure self-interest, lots of people object to me and I wouldn’t like to have them impose their values on me, so it seems only fair.

This argument is increasingly being overlooked, as our society becomes ever more willing to impose health fascist criteria on everybody. We can all join in this game. Whole sections of the media rely for their content on the alleged excessive fatness/thinness of “celebrities” or on peddling weight loss and exercise programmes. The food industry is constantly working out ever more complex ways to adulterate our food on the grounds of making it “healthier.”

Guess what, as a society, the more obsessed we become with our body size, the fatter and fatter we get. That’s working out well then.

A comment on this blog took us to task for joining the anti- “Doctor” McKeith clamour, largely on the grounds that we must be “fat” if we didn’t accept McKeith’s legitimacy. And that, having assumed we were “fat”, the commenter could more or less take the moral high ground.

I always want to say, so, if I don’t break the health rules (whatever they may be at any moment) I’ll live forever then? Great. That’s a weight off my mind

More on McKeith

Posted on by

It seems I am not alone in getting some satisfaction out of seeing McKeith have to admit she is not a doctor.
“Back off, man; I’m a scientist.” also picks up the topic with its “Bless” post.

The post picks up on McKeith saying how she feels “bullied” and she claims ” I’m entitled to use ‘Dr’ because I have a PhD in Holistic Nutrition, which I studied for four years to get.” Now that is funny. Obviously she is joking…

Anyway, the Back off, man; I’m a scientist makes the reasonable comments:

This is a woman who goes on TV and makes “an obese woman cry, in her own back garden, by showing her a tombstone with her own name on it, made out of chocolate”, who said to another “‘Do you want to see your daughter get married and have babies? Because the way things are going you’ll have a heart attack at 40″.

She’s made a career out of making fat people cry, so just let the satisfaction flow.

Well Said that man!

Crackpot McKeith Punished

Posted on by

Well it is about time.

has been a prominent enough person in the general UK media to have her own category on Ben Goldacre’s fascinating Bad Science blog. If you dont know about her this extract from Bad Science gives a bit of background:

Call her the Awful Poo Lady, call her Dr Gillian McKeith PhD: she is an empire, a multi-millionaire, a phenomenon, a prime-time TV celebrity, a bestselling author. She has her own range of foods and mysterious powders, she has pills to give you an erection, and her face is in every health food store in the country. Scottish Conservative politicians want her to advise the government. The Soil Association gave her a prize for educating the public.

She is a force of pure marketing evil. She bullies fat people to the point at which they burst into tears. She advocates all manner of weird and wonderful woo as cures for various illnesses. Her ideas about health diet defy belief. She claimes eating Chlorophyl will oxygenate your blood. She claims DNA/RNA is only present in growing cells and defies aging. “In the heart,” she explains, “chlorophyll aids in the transmission of nerve impulses that control contraction.”

In short, she is completely off her head.

You can read more about McKeith on Quackwatch – www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mckeith.html or better still, Ben Goldacre’s blog where you can read the full details of her current problems with the Advertising Standards Agency.

In association with Channel 4 Nutjob McKeith pushed herself onto the UK public as a “Clinical Nutritionist” (woo-title if ever there was one). She is often called Dr McKeith, or even “Dr Gillian McKeith PhD,” with the implication she is a medical doctor when in fact she has a PhD. However, this PhD is from a woo-factory of dynamic proportions. She has her “PhD” from the Australasian College of Health Sciences (Portland, US), yet you cant find out any of the details of her final thesis. She touts her “professional membership” with the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, yet this is the same level of membership Ben Goldacre’s dead cat has.

The amount that could be written about McKeith is phenomenal. She combines ignorance, voodoo-woo and an a massively outspoken personality. She capitalises upon lazy people not bothering to understand science but who are enamoured by the trappings of science and the weird rituals she practices (sniffing crap for example). To paraphrase a USENET post I read, as people move away from religion, the void is filled by conspiracy theories, sprituality and mumbo-jumbo – it is the conservation of idiocy. McKeith is a prime example of this.

Anyway, it seems a reader of the BadScience.net column has actually gone to the advertising standards agency and complained about her use of the title “Dr” and “PhD.” The ASA has upheld the complaint, but to avoid a formal ruling, McKeith has voluntarily agreed to stop calling herself “Dr.” This is not as toothless as it may sound, as she has spent a lot of time building a rep based on her status as “Dr McKeith.” She claims that she will continue to call herself Gillian McKeith PhD but from Ben Goldacre’s leaked wording of the ASA text that was also going to be prohibited (note: this is in relation to advertising materials only).

This may be a small victory for common sense but it is still a victory!