Bad Science

More than anything it illustrates how this atomised, overcomplicated view of diet can be used to mislead and oversell. I don’t think it’s melodramatic to speak of people disempowered and paralysed by confusion, with all the unnecessarily complex and conflicting messages about food. If you’re really worried, you can buy Fruitella Plus with added vitamins A, C, E and calcium, and during Christmas 2007 two new antioxidant products came on the market, the ultimate expression of how nutritionism has perverted and distorted our common sense about food. Choxi+ is milk chocolate with ‘extra antioxidants’. The Daily Mirror says it’s ‘too good to be true’. It’s ‘chocolate that is good for you, as well as seductive’, according to the Daily Telegraph. ‘Guilt free’, says the Daily Mail: it’s ‘the chocolate bar that’s “healthier” than 5lb of apples’. The company even ‘recommends’ two pieces of its chocolate a day. Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s is promoting Red Heart wine – with extra antioxidants – as if drinking the stuff was a duty to your grandchildren.

If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, and live your whole life in every way as well as you can: exercise regularly as part of your daily routine, avoid obesity, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke, and don’t get distracted from the real, basic, simple causes of ill health. But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.

I have deliberately expressed this risk in terms of the ‘relative risk increase’, as part of a dubious in-joke with myself. You will learn about this on page 240.

Dr Gillian McKeith PhD

I’m going to push the boat out here, and suggest that since you’ve bought this book you may already be harbouring some suspicions about multi-millionaire pill entrepreneur and clinical nutritionist Gillian McKeith (or, to give her full medical title: Gillian McKeith).

She is an empire, a prime-time TV celebrity, a best-selling 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. But to anyone who knows even the slightest bit about science, she is a joke.

The most important thing to recognise is that there is nothing new here. Although the contemporary nutritionism movement likes to present itself as a thoroughly modern and evidence-based enterprise, the food-guru industry, with its outlandish promises, moralising and sexual obsessions, goes back at least two centuries.

Like our modern food gurus, the historical figures of nutritionism were mostly enthusiastic lay people, and they all claimed to understand nutritional science, evidence and medicine better than the scientists and doctors of their era. The advice and the products may have shifted with prevailing religious and moral notions, but they have always played to the market, be it puritan or liberal, New Age or Christian.

Graham crackers are a digestive biscuit invented in the nineteenth century by Sylvester Graham, the first great advocate of vegetarianism and nutritionism as we would know it, and proprietor of the world’s first health food shop. Like his descendants today, Graham mixed up sensible notions – such as cutting down on cigarettes and alcohol – with some other, rather more esoteric, ideas which he concocted for himself. He warned that ketchup and mustard, for example, can cause ‘insanity’.

I’ve got no great beef with the organic food movement (even if its claims are a little unrealistic), but it’s still interesting to note that Graham’s health food store – in 1837 – heavily promoted its food as being grown according to ‘physiological principles’ on ‘virgin unvitiated soil’. By the retro-fetishism of the time, this was soil which had not been ‘subjected’ to ‘over-stimulation’ … by manure.

Soon these food marketing techniques were picked up by more overtly puritanical religious zealots like John Harvey Kellogg, the man behind the cornflake. Kellogg was a natural healer, anti-masturbation campaigner, and health food advocate, promoting his granola bars as the route to abstinence, temperance and solid morals. He ran a sanatorium for private clients, using ‘holistic’ techniques, including Gillian McKeith’s favourite, colonic irrigation.

Kellogg was also a keen anti-masturbation campaigner. He advocated exposing the tissue on the end of the penis, so that it smarted with friction during acts of self-pollution (and you do have to wonder about the motives of anyone who thinks the problem through in that much detail). Here is a particularly enjoyable passage from his Treatment for Self-Abuse and its Effects (1888), in which Kellogg outlines his views on circumcision:

The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment. In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.

By the early twentieth century a man called Bernard Macfadden had updated the nutritionism model for contemporary moral values, and so became the most commercially successful health guru of his time. He changed his Christian name from Bernard to Bernarr, because it sounded more like the roar of a lion (this is completely true), and ran a successful magazine called Physical Culture, featuring beautiful bodies doing healthy things. The pseudoscience and the posturing were the same, but he used liberal sexuality to his advantage, selling his granola bars as a food that would promote a muscular, thrusting, lustful lifestyle in that decadent rush that flooded the populations of the West between the wars.

More recently there was Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Louisiana Senator and the man behind Hadacol (‘I had’da call it something’). It cured everything, cost $100 a year for the recommended dose, and to Dudley’s open amazement, it sold in millions. ‘They came in to buy Hadacol,’ said one pharmacist, ‘when they didn’t have money to buy food. They had holes in their shoes and they paid $3.50 for a bottle of Hadacol.’

LeBlanc made no medicinal claims, but pushed customer testimonials to an eager media. He appointed a medical director who had been convicted in California of practising medicine with no licence and no medical degree. A diabetic patient almost died when she gave up insulin to treat herself with Hadacol, but nobody cared. ‘It’s a craze. It’s a culture. It’s a political movement,’ said Newsweek.

It’s easy to underestimate the phenomenal and enduring commercial appeal of these kinds of products and claims throughout history. By 1950 Hadacol’s sales were over $20 million, with an advertising spend of $1 million a month, in 700 daily papers and on 528 radio stations. LeBlanc took a travelling medicine show of 130 vehicles on a tour of 3,800 miles through the South. Entry was paid in Hadacol bottle tops, and the shows starred Groucho and Chico Marx, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and educational exhibitions of scantily clad women illustrating ‘the history of the bathing suit’. Dixieland bands played songs like ‘Hadacol Boogie’ and ‘Who Put the Pep in Grandma?’.

The Senator used Hadacol’s success to drive his political career, and his competitors, the Longs – descended from the Democrat reformer Huey Long – panicked, launching their own patent medicine called ‘Vita-Long’. By 1951 LeBlanc was spending more in advertising that he was making in sales, and in February of that year, shortly after he sold the company – and shortly before it folded – he appeared on the TV show You Bet Your Life with his old friend Groucho Marx. ‘Hadacol,’ said Groucho, ‘what’s that good for?’ ‘Well,’ said LeBlanc, ‘it was good for about five and a half million dollars for me last year.’

The point I am making is that there is nothing new under the sun. There have always been health gurus selling magic potions. But I am not a consumer journalist, and I don’t care if people have unusual qualifications, or sell silly substances. McKeith is, for me, very simply a menace to the public understanding of science. She has a mainstream prime-time television nutrition show, yet she seems to misunderstand not nuances, but the most basic aspects of biology, things that a schoolchild could put her straight on.

I first noticed Dr Gillian McKeith when a reader sent in a clipping from the Radio Times about her first series on Channel 4. McKeith was styled, very strikingly, as a white-coated academic and scientific authority on nutrition, a ‘clinical nutritionist’, posing in laboratories, surrounded by test tubes, and talking about diagnoses and molecules. She was also quoted here saying something a fourteen-year-old doing GCSE biology could easily have identified as pure nonsense: recommending spinach, and the darker leaves on plants, because they contain more chlorophyll. According to McKeith these are ‘high in oxygen’ and will ‘really oxygenate your blood’. This same claim is repeated all over her books.