Bad Science

remember.

To me this is cargo-cult science, as Professor Richard Feynman described it over thirty years ago, in reference to the similarities between pseudoscientists and the religious activities on a few small Melanesian islands in the 1950s:

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.

Like the rituals of the cargo cult, the form of McKeith’s pseudo-academic work is superficially correct: 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 very funny. It makes me quite depressed to think about her, sitting up, perhaps alone, studiously and earnestly typing this stuff out.

Should you feel sorry for her? One window into her world is the way in which she has responded to criticism: with statements that seem to be, well, wrong. It’s cautious to assume that she will do the same thing with anything that I write here, so in preparation for the rebuttals to come, let’s look at some of the rebuttals from the recent past.

In 2007, as has been noted, she was censured by the MHRA for selling a rather crass range of herbal sex pills called Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex, advertised as having been shown by a ‘controlled study’ to promote sexual satisfaction, and sold with explicit medicinal claims. They were illegal for sale in the UK. She was ordered to remove the products from sale immediately. She complied – the alternative would have been prosecution – but her website announced that the sex pills had been withdrawn because of ‘the new EU licensing laws regarding herbal products’. She engaged in a spot of 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.

Nonsense. I contacted the MHRA, and they said: ‘This has nothing to do with new EU regulations. The information on the McKeith website is incorrect.’ Was it a mistake? ‘Ms McKeith’s organisation had already been made aware of the requirements of medicines legislation in previous years; there was no reason at all for all the products not to be compliant with the law.’ They went on. ‘The Wild Pink Yam and Horny Goat Weed products marketed by McKeith Research Ltd were never legal for sale in the UK.’

Then there is the matter of the CV. Dr McKeith’s PhD is from Clayton College of Natural Health, a nonaccredited correspondence course college, which unusually for an academic institution also sells its own range of vitamin pills through its website. Her masters degree is from the same august institution. At current Clayton prices, it’s $6,400 in fees for the PhD, and less for the masters, but if you pay for both at once you get a $300 discount (and if you really want to push the boat out, they have a package deal: two doctorates and a masters for $12,100 all in).

On her CV, posted on her management website, McKeith claimed to have a PhD from the rather good American College of Nutrition. When this was pointed out, her representative explained that this was merely a mistake, made by a Spanish work experience kid who posted the wrong CV. The attentive reader may have noticed that the very same claim about the American College of Nutrition was also in one of her books from several years previously.

In 2007 a regular from my website – I could barely contain my pride – took McKeith to the Advertising Standards Authority, complaining about her using the title ‘doctor’ on the basis of a qualification gained by correspondence course from a nonaccredited American college: and won. The ASA came to the view that McKeith’s advertising breached two clauses of the Committee of Advertising Practice code: ‘substantiation’ and ‘truthfulness’.

Dr McKeith sidestepped the publication of a damning ASA draft adjudication at the last minute by accepting – ‘voluntarily’ – not to call herself ‘doctor’ in her advertising any more. In the news coverage that followed, McKeith suggested that the adjudication was only concerned with whether she had presented herself as a medical doctor. Again, this is not true. A copy of that draft adjudication has fallen into my lap – imagine that – and it specifically says that people seeing the adverts would reasonably expect her to have either a medical degree, or a PhD from an accredited university.

She even managed to get one of her corrections into a profile on her in my own newspaper, the Guardian: ‘Doubt has also been cast on the value of McKeith’s certified membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, especially since Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre managed to buy the same membership online for his dead cat for $60. 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.”’

Well. My dead cat Hettie is also a ‘certified professional member’ of the AANC. I have the certificate hanging in my loo. Perhaps it didn’t even occur to the journalist that McKeith could be wrong. More likely, in the tradition of nervous journalists, I suspect that 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. It may sound disproportionate to suggest that I will continue to point out these obfuscations for as long as they are made, but I will, because to me, there is a strange fascination in tracking their true extent.

Although perhaps I should not be so bold. She has a libel case against the Sun over comments it made in 2004. The Sun is part of a large, wealthy media conglomerate, and it can protect itself with a large and well-remunerated legal team. Others can’t. A charming but obscure blogger called PhDiva made some relatively innocent comments about nutritionists, mentioning McKeith, and received a letter threatening costly legal action from Atkins Solicitors, ‘the reputation and brand-management specialists’. Google received a threatening legal letter simply for linking to – forgive me – a fairly obscure webpage on McKeith. She has also made legal threats to an excellently funny website called Eclectech for featuring an animated cartoon of her singing a silly song at around the time she was on Fame Academy.

Most of these legal tussles revolve around the issue of her qualifications, but such things shouldn’t be difficult or complicated. If anyone wanted to check my degrees, memberships or affiliations, they could call up the institutions concerned and get instant confirmation: job done. If you said I wasn’t a doctor, I wouldn’t sue you; I’d roar with laughter.

But if you contact the Australasian College of Health Sciences (Portland, Oregon), where McKeith has a ‘pending diploma in herbal medicine’, they say they can’t tell you anything about their students. If you contact Clayton College of Natural Health to ask where you can read her PhD, they say you can’t. What kind of organisations are these? If I said I had a PhD from Cambridge, US or UK (I have neither, and I claim no great authority), it would only take you a day to find it in their library.

These are perhaps petty episodes. But for me the most concerning aspect of the way she responds to questioning of her scientific ideas is exemplified by a story from 2000, when Dr McKeith approached a retired Professor of Nutritional Medicine from the University of London. Shortly after the publication of her book Living Food for Health, John Garrow wrote an article about some of the bizarre scientific claims Dr McKeith was making, and his piece was published in a fairly obscure medical newsletter. He was struck by the strength with which she presented her credentials as a scientist (‘I continue every day to research, test and write furiously so that you may benefit …’ etc.). He has since said that he assumed – like many others – that she was a proper doctor. Sorry: a medical doctor. Sorry: a qualified, conventional medical doctor who attended an accredited medical school.

In this book McKeith promised to explain how you can ‘boost your energy, heal your organs and cells, detoxify your body, strengthen your kidneys, improve your digestion, strengthen your immune system, reduce cholesterol and high blood pressure, break down fat, cellulose and starch, activate the enzyme energies of your body, strengthen your spleen and liver function, increase mental and physical endurance, regulate your blood sugar, and lessen hunger cravings and lose weight’.

These are not modest goals, but her thesis was that they were all possible with a diet rich in enzymes from ‘live’ raw food – fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and especially live sprouts, which are ‘the food sources of digestive