Bad Science

Forgive me for patronising, but before we go on you may need a little refresher on the miracle of photosynthesis. Chlorophyll is a small green molecule which is found in chloroplasts, the miniature factories in plant cells that take the energy from sunlight and use it to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen. Using this process, called photosynthesis, plants store the energy from sunlight in the form of sugar (high in calories, as you know), and they can then use this sugar energy to make everything else they need: like protein, and fibre, and flowers, and corn on the cob, and bark, and leaves, and amazing traps that eat flies, and cures for cancer, and tomatoes, and wispy dandelions, and conkers, and chillies, and all the other amazing things that the plant world has going on.

Meanwhile, you breathe in the oxygen that the plants give off during this process – essentially as a byproduct of their sugar manufacturing – and you also eat the plants, or you eat animals that eat the plants, or you build houses out of wood, or you make painkiller from willow bark, or any of the other amazing things that happen with plants. You also breathe out carbon dioxide, and the plants can combine that with water to make more sugar again, using the energy from sunlight, and so the cycle continues.

Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected – not to mention true – that I can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative’ nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work.

Is chlorophyll ‘high in oxygen’? No. It helps to make oxygen. In sunlight. And it’s pretty dark in your bowels: in fact, if there’s any light in there at all then something’s gone badly wrong. So any chlorophyll you eat will not create oxygen, and even if it did, even if Dr Gillian McKeith PhD stuck a searchlight right up your bum to prove her point, and your salad began photosynthesising, even if she insufflated your guts with carbon dioxide through a tube, to give the chloroplasts something to work with, and by some miracle you really did start to produce oxygen in there, you still wouldn’t absorb a significant amount of it through your bowel, because your bowel is adapted to absorb food, while your lungs are optimised to absorb oxygen. You do not have gills in your bowels. Neither, since we’ve mentioned them, do fish. And while we’re talking about it, you probably don’t want oxygen inside your abdomen anyway: in keyhole surgery, surgeons have to inflate your abdomen to help them see what they’re doing, but they don’t use oxygen, because there’s methane fart gas in there too, and we don’t want anyone catching fire on the inside. There is no oxygen in your bowel.

So who is this person, and how did she come to be teaching us about diet, on a prime-time television show, on a national terrestrial channel? What possible kind of science degree can she have, to be making such basic mistakes that a schoolkid would spot? Was this an isolated error? A one-off slip of the tongue? I think not.

Actually, I know not, because as soon as I saw that ridiculous quote I ordered some more McKeith books. Not only does she make the same mistake in numerous other places, but it seems to me that her understanding of even the most basic elements of science is deeply, strangely distorted. In You Are What You Eat (p.211) she says: ‘Each sprouting seed is packed with the nutritional energy needed to create a full grown healthy plant.’

This is hard to follow. Does a fully grown, healthy oak tree, a hundred feet tall, contain the same amount of energy as a tiny acorn? No. Does a fully grown, healthy sugarcane plant contain the same amount of nutritional energy – measure it in ‘calories’ if you like – as a sugarcane seed? No. Stop me if I’m boring you, in fact stop me if I’ve misunderstood something in what she’s said, but to me this seems like almost the same mistake as the photosynthesis thing, because that extra energy to grow a fully grown plant comes, again, from photosynthesis, where plants use light to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar and then into everything else that plants are made of.

This is not an incidental issue, an obscure backwater of McKeith’s work, nor is it a question of which ‘school of thought’ you speak for: the ‘nutritional energy’ of a piece of food is one of the most important things you could possibly think of for a nutritionist to know about. I can tell you for a fact that the amount of nutritional energy you will get from eating one sugarcane seed is a hell of a lot less than you’d get from eating all the sugarcane from the plant that grew from it. These aren’t passing errors, or slips of the tongue (I have a policy, as it were, of not quibbling on spontaneous utterances, because we all deserve the chance to fluff): these are clear statements from published tomes.

Watching McKeith’s TV show with the eye of a doctor, it rapidly becomes clear that even here, frighteningly, she doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about. She examines patients’ abdomens on an examination couch as if she is a doctor, and confidently announces that she can feel which organs are inflamed. But clinical examination is a fine art at the best of times, and what she is claiming is like identifying which fluffy toy someone has hidden under a mattress (you’re welcome to try this at home).

She claims to be able to identify lymphoedema, swollen ankles from fluid retention, and she almost does it right – at least, she kind of puts her fingers in roughly the right place, but only for about half a second, before triumphantly announcing her findings. If you’d like to borrow my second edition copy of Epstein and de Bono’s Clinical Examination (I don’t think there were many people in my year at medical school who didn’t buy a copy), you’ll discover that to examine for lymphoedema, you press firmly for around thirty seconds, to gently compress the exuded fluid out of the tissues, then take your fingers away, and look to see if they have left a dent behind.

In case you think I’m being selective, and only quoting McKeith’s most ridiculous moments, there’s more: the tongue is ‘a window to the organs – the right side shows what the gallbladder is up to, and the left side the liver’. Raised capillaries on your face are a sign of ‘digestive enzyme insufficiency – your body is screaming for food enzymes’. Thankfully, Gillian can sell you some food enzymes from her website. ‘Skid mark stools’ (she is obsessed with faeces and colonic irrigation) are ‘a sign of dampness inside the body – a very common condition in Britain’. If your stools are foul-smelling you are ‘sorely in need of digestive enzymes’. Again. Her treatment for pimples on the forehead – not pimples anywhere else, mind you, only on the forehead – is a regular enema. Cloudy urine is ‘a sign that your body is damp and acidic, due to eating the wrong foods’. The spleen is ‘your energy battery’.

So we have seen scientific facts – very basic ones – on which Dr McKeith seems to be mistaken. What of scientific process? She has claimed, repeatedly and to anyone who will listen, that she is engaged in clinical scientific research. Let’s step back a moment, because from everything I’ve said, you might reasonably assume that McKeith has been clearly branded as some kind of alternative therapy maverick. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This doctor has been presented, consistently, up front, by Channel 4, her own website, her management company and her books as a scientific authority on nutrition.

Many watching her TV show quite naturally assumed she was a medical doctor. And why not? There she was, examining patients, performing and interpreting blood tests, wearing a white coat, surrounded by test tubes, ‘Dr McKeith’, ‘the diet doctor’, giving diagnoses, talking authoritatively about treatment, using complex scientific terminology with all the authority she could muster, and sticking irrigation equipment nice and invasively right up into people’s rectums.

Now, to be fair, I should mention something about the doctorate, but I should also be clear: I don’t think this is the most important part of the story. It’s the funniest and most memorable part of the story, but the real action is whether McKeith is capable of truly behaving like the nutritional science academic she claims to be.

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 … but when you follow the numbers, and check the references, it’s shocking how often they aren’t what she claimed them to be in the main body of the text, 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. ‘In laboratory experiments with anaemic animals, red-blood cell counts have returned to normal within four or five days when chlorophyll was given,’ she says. Her reference for this experimental data is a magazine called Health Store News. ‘In the heart,’ she explains, ‘chlorophyll aids in the transmission of nerve impulses that control contraction.’ A statement that is referenced to the second issue of a magazine called Earthletter. Fair enough, if that’s what you want to read – I’m bending over to be reasonable here – but it’s clearly not a suitable source to reference that claim. This is her PhD,