She was "Dr McKeith", "the diet doctor", giving diagnoses, talking knowledgeably about treatment, with complex scientific terminology, and all the authority her white coat and laboratory setting could muster. So back to the science. Stress can deplete your DNA, but algae will increase it: and she reckons it's only present in growing cells. Is my semen growing? Is a virus growing? Is chicken liver pate growing?
All of these contain plenty of DNA. She says that "each sprouting seed is packed with the nutritional energy needed to create a full-grown, healthy plant". Does a banana plant have the same amount of calories as a banana seed? The ridiculousness is endless. In fact, I don't care what kind of squabbles McKeith wants to engage in over the technicalities of whether a non-accredited correspondence-course PhD from the US entitles you, by the strictest letter of the law, to call yourself "doctor": to me, nobody can be said to have a meaningful qualification in any biology-related subject if they make the same kind of basic mistakes made by McKeith.
And the scholarliness of her work is a thing to behold: she produces lengthy documents that have an air of "referenciness", with nice little superscript numbers, which talk about trials, and studies, and research, and papers Or they refer to funny little magazines and books, such as Delicious, Creative Living, Healthy Eating, and my favourite, Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet, rather than proper academic journals.
She even does this in the book Miracle Superfood, which, we are told, is the published form of her PhD. Her reference for this experimental data is a magazine called Health Store News. To me this is cargo cult science, as the great Professor Richard Feynman described Melanesian religious activities 30 years ago: "During the war they saw aeroplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.
So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head as headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the aeroplanes to land.
They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No aeroplanes land. McKeith's pseudo-academic work is like the rituals of the cargo cult: the form is superficially right, the superscript numbers are there, the technical words are scattered about, she talks about research and trials and findings, but the substance is lacking.
I actually don't find this bit very funny. It makes me quite depressed to think about her, sitting up, perhaps alone, studiously and earnestly typing this stuff out. One window into her world is the extraordinary way she responds to criticism: with legal threats and blatantly, outrageously misleading statements, emitted with such regularity that it's reasonable to assume she will do the same thing with this current kerfuffle over her use of the title "doctor". So that you know how to approach the rebuttals to come, let's look at McKeith's rebuttals of the recent past.
Three months ago she was censured by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency MHRA for illegally selling a rather tragic range of herbal sex pills called Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex, advertised as shown by a "controlled study" to promote sexual satisfaction, and sold with explicit medicinal claims. She was ordered to remove the products from sale immediately.
She complied - the alternative would have been prosecution - but in response, McKeith's website announced that the sex pills had been withdrawn because of "the new EU licensing laws regarding herbal products". She engaged in Europhobic banter with the Scottish Herald newspaper: "EU bureaucrats are clearly concerned that people in the UK are having too much good sex," she explained.
The information on the McKeith website is incorrect. Now, once would be unfortunate, but this is an enduring pattern. When McKeith was first caught out on the ridiculous and erroneous claims of her CV - she claimed, for example, to have a PhD from the reputable American College of Nutrition - her representatives suggested that this was a mistake, made by a Spanish work experience kid, who posted the wrong CV.
Except the very same claim about the American College of Nutrition was also in one of her books from several years previously.
That's a long work experience stint. McKeith's spokeswoman says of this membership: "Gillian has 'professional membership', which is membership designed for practising nutritional and dietary professionals, and is distinct from 'associate membership', which is open to all individuals. To gain professional membership Gillian provided proof of her degree and three professional references.
I have the certificate hanging in my loo. Perhaps it didn't even occur to the journalist that McKeith could be wrong. More likely, of course, in the tradition of nervous journalists, I suspect she was hurried, on deadline, and felt she had to get McKeith's "right of reply" in, even if it cast doubts on - I'll admit my beef here - my own hard-won investigative revelations about my dead cat. I mean, I don't sign my dead cat up to bogus professional organisations for the good of my health, you know.
But those who criticise McKeith have reason to worry. McKeith goes after people, and nastily. She has a libel case against the Sun over comments they made in that has still not seen much movement. But the Sun is a large, wealthy institution, and it can protect itself with a large and well-remunerated legal team.
Others can't. McKeith or someone controlling her Twitter tweeted back calling the book "lies" [13] Whoever operates Ms. McKeith's Twitter then deleted the tweets and tried to remove links to said Twitter from her official website, but very hamfistedly, and without reckoning on just how many people had screencapped the tweets. Goldacre was somewhat bemused, and really doesn't want to bring legal action against her, but does quite seriously want her to retract the statement.
Get Me Out of Here. In early , her official website became unusable or even offline at times , while her Twitter account [18] was only sparingly active, mostly responding to the occasional fan mail about how much weight people lost on her diets. The website started up again in January As of she appears to advocate for anti-vax, anti-lockdown and other worrying trends. Are we surpised? Nominations and campaigning for the RationalWiki Moderator Election is underway and will end on November Jump to: navigation , search.
The books are published in some 30 countries. In total, Gillian McKeith books have sold more than 4 million copies worldwide.
Gillian McKeith points out that food is potentially an emotional issue. It can be uncomfortable for some people to have to give up certain junk foods to which they have become accustomed. Family: The daughter of a civil servant and office worker, McKeith was raised on a council estate. She married the American lawyer Howard Magaziner and they have two daughters together.
Career: After working in marketing and business, she retrained as a nutritionist. She has released nine further books, television shows and a range of branded foods. In , she agreed with the Advertising Standards Authority to remove the "Dr" from her advertising after complaints that her qualification was obtained via a correspondence course from an unaccredited institution. She says: "If I'm stuck in a crate with some kind of thing I'm probably going to pass out. We all know I'm afraid of everything that is in this jungle.
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