Tag Archives: McKeith

Supplemental Woe

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Following on from the expose about McKeith and her crackpottery it is interesting that the news of late has been trumpeting the “dangers” of using vitamin and herbal supplements. Remember one of the main claims of the woo-ers supporting McKeith is that modern medicine kills and all these herbal supplements dont.

It seems (JAMA, vol 297, p842) that this is not the case. The report comes to the following conclusions:

Treatment with beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E may increase mortality. The potential roles of vitamin C and selenium on mortality need further study.

The study found that people taking beta carotene supplements were at 7% greater risk of death than those who were not taking the supplements, and with Vit E it was 4% greater risk. More worryingly, Vitamin A supplementation appeared to increase the risk of mortality by 16%.

Now, there is a bit of a cautionary comment to go with this – this is a “meta analysis” study not a direct study, so there is the possibility that the people being given the supplements were at a greater risk of dying than the general public anyway, however one of the study group has commented “seventy percent of the participants were healthy.” (New Scientist)

Assuming this study is an accurate reflection, it is a nice slap in the face of those who push this woo in the place of retrovirals, immunisation and other “real” medicine 🙂

Bad Bad Science

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Although it only attracted minimal response here (one troll who never came back), the news about Cranky McKeith being told to stop calling herself a Doctor resulted in mountains of posts (281 last time I looked) on Ben Goldacres’ BadScience blog.

Now this is understandable as it was one of Ben’s regular readers who shopped McKeith to the ASA and resulted in bringing her Woo to the news. (Not to mention it is supported by a column in a national newspaper…)

That said, there are some striking similarities between the woo posted by the pro-McKeith (and her ilk) lobby on Badscience, the troll who stopped by here for a few seconds and the rest of the nonsense which pollutes the internet.

Take this, from badscience.net, as an example:

Ben, I think you will turn out to be just as arrogant as all the doctors that go before you. Gillian Mckeith, if nothing else, has encouraged people to realise that nutrition has a direct link to their quality of life and health. I would rather trust in good nutrition to prevent me from getting ill than an ever increasing supply of pharmeceutical drugs that cover up symptoms until they get worse. How many people do die each year from side effects of drug intervention? and what exactly was your Hippocratic oath? With all the incentives doctors get from pharmeceutical companies and the huge power those companies wield one could imagine that it was not really in a doctors best interests for a patient to get better. Humans are not machines, we are self-healing organisms and should be encouraged to remember this. Doctors are trained in body mechanics but not in healing or health and most of them are too arrogant to accept that there are other journeys to health.

I mean, that is good…. I am fairly sure it hits pretty much every logical fallacy I can think of.

The big claim goes along the lines of “if nothing else…” and this is used by apologetics of all flavour – ranging from the religious who say “if nothing else religion has made people happier” (or whatever) to the cranks who think the cruel and inhuman treatment of fat people doled out by McKeith is a GOODTHING™®. While it is (remotely) possible that McKeith has made people aware that nutrition is related to health (and if they needed McKeith to become aware of this, then I suspect letting them die would have been the kinder thing to do), this does not for one second excuse the nonsense, crackpottery and sheer, unadulterated bad science she wrapped her nonsense up in.

Creating weird rituals, falsifing science and tricking the public is not an “acceptable” means to an end.

The “how many people die each year” is fantastic. The appeal to fear there is brilliant because at its core, the sentence carries some truth. People do die of drug side effects. Side effects are called side effects for a reason. No one in their right mind thinks anything which works to treat an illness is 100% safe. The only possible reason McKeith’s recommendations were safe is because they do not do anything. This argument always pops up from the homeopathic woo-ers and it is tired and repetative at best.

This poor poster puts the nail in the coffin with “Doctors are trained in body mechanics but not in healing or health and most of them are too arrogant to accept that there are other journeys to health.” Well done.

Sometimes I despair that we allow people like this to have recourse to the NHS when they get sick and suddenly realise that crystals (or whatever nonsense they are in to) will not mend them.

More on McKeith

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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!

Why 5 pieces of fruit & veg anyway?

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I am all for hammering the fake nutritionist tosh. “Doctor” Gillian McKeith “PhD (Intenet)” is an obvious charlatan. It’s very hard to see how anyone gave her any credence but – from Channel 4’s point of view – she rifled through human crap on tv, in the presence of its manufacturers even. This was always going to draw audiences. Actual nutrition qualifications would have just been icing on the poocake from the Channel 4 point of view.

I’m not a hundred per cent convinced by more official nutrition advice either. Everyone “knows” we are supposed to eat 5 pieces of fruit or vegetables a day. The government tell us so. There are posters in my doctor’s surgery. I am not disputing that we should eat fruit and vegetables (I’m a vegetarian. I would be going very hungry if I didn’t.)

I just want to know – Who said it? Where is the evidence? How big is a serving anyway?

Well, it turns out that original recommendation came from the World Health Organisation. The 5 a day is a UK version. The USA is more demanding. It wants you to eat 9.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Pyramid recommends three to five servings of vegetables and two to four servings of fruits per day University of Iowa .

Are US fruit and veg weaker in their healing powers? Do American need higher standards of health than we do because of lacking an NHS?

Where does this advice come from? The UK Department of Health has some referenced links to evidence, on its site. Most of these actually turn out to be links to other DOH documents that repeat the same advice. There are however some links to research papers that report lower rates of heart disease and a couple of other reduced risks in those who eat more fruit and vegetables.

So far, fine. The researchers are scientists, so I am sure they will have adjusted the figures for other things that are correlated with living longer – apart from eating more fruit and veg – like being better off & more health conscious generally. I am perfectly capable of working out that fruit and veg are good for you, from any evidence they can produce from their research (plus a lifetime of imbibing this apparently “common sense” message.)

I would like someone to show me where the number 5 came from – was it just a think of number game? Is there any evidence?

I would also like someone to show me where the obscure rules came in – potatoes don’t count; juice only counts as one even if you drink litres of different kinds of juices. Where does the portion size of a serving come from? How can it apply to everyone from a 6’6″ tall heavy set man to a slight 5 year-old?

Unless someone shows there is a real scientific basis for this stuff, it strikes me as government promoted woo. It seems we won’t respond to messages like “It’s probably good for your health to eat a lot of fruit and vegetables.” We aren’t intelligent enough to understand that message. We need to be directed, like the good 1984-in-2007 public we are, in terms that are simple and direct and very prescriptive. It doesn’t matter if the instructions are assembled from guesswork and back of an envelope calculations. As long as we have some rules to follow. With numbers.

Rather like “Doctor” McKeith’s approach to nutrition, really. Oh hang on, she’s an obvious quack.

It seems a disturbingly short step from this nonsense to deciding that vitamins do cure AIDS. I think you’d probably find that most people in the world who have malaria don’t eat 5 to 9 portions of fruit and veg a day. (A lot of them probably are lucky to eat. )

I bet the research shows that most people in the world with HIV infections don’t have cars or travel on planes. I suggest that you drive 10 miles a day and fly 200 miles every 6 months, to lower your chances of catching it.

Crackpot McKeith Punished

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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!