claims unless they submit to the licensing procedure,’ it said, ‘manufacturers and marketing companies are resorting to methods such as celebrity endorsements, free pseudomedical product literature, and press campaigns that have resulted in uncritically promotional features in large-circulation newspapers and magazines.’
Access to the unpoliced world of the media is well recognised as a major market advantage for Equazen, and it is an advantage that they press home hard. In the press release announcing the company’s acquisition by the pharmaceutical company Galenica, they declared: ‘Coverage of research showing the benefits of our Eye Q has appeared numerous times on national television and radio … that is widely credited with being instrumental in the significant growth of the UK omega-3 sector since 2003.’ To be honest, I would prefer to see a clearly labelled ‘nonsense box’ on all packaging and advertising, in which alternative therapy producers can freely make any claims they want to, instead of this misleading editorial coverage, because adverts are at least clearly labelled as such.
The wheels of time
Of course, these Durham trials are not the first time the world has seen such an extraordinary effort to promote one food supplement’s powers through media stories on inaccessible research. David Horrobin was a 1980s pharmaceutical multi-millionaire – one of the richest men in Britain – and his Efamol food supplements empire (built, like Equazen’s, on ‘essential fatty acids’) was worth an eye-watering ?550 million at its peak. The efforts of his company went far further than anything one could find in the world of Equazen and Durham Council.
In 1984, staff at Horrobin’s US distributors were found guilty in court of misbranding their food supplement as a drug; they were circumventing Food and Drug Administration regulations which forbade them from making unfounded claims for their supplement pills in advertising by engineering media coverage that treated them as if they had proven medical benefits. In the court case, paperwork was produced as evidence in which Horrobin explicitly said things like: ‘Obviously you could not advertise [evening primrose oil] for these purposes but equally obviously there are ways of getting the information across …’ Company memos described elaborate promotional schemes: planting articles on their research in the media, deploying researchers to make claims on their behalf, using radio phone-ins and the like.
In 2003 Horrobin’s researcher Dr Goran Jamal was found guilty by the GMC of fraudulently concocting research data on trials which he had performed for Horrobin. He had been promised 0.5 per cent of the product’s profits should it come to market (Horrobin was not responsible, but this is a fairly unusual payment arrangement which would rather dangle temptation in front of your eyes).
As with the fish-oil pills, Horrobin’s products were always in the news, but it was difficult to get hold of the research data. In 1989 he published a famous meta-analysis of trials in a dermatology journal which found that his lead product, evening primrose oil, was effective in eczema. This meta-analysis excluded the one available large published trial (which was negative), but included the two oldest studies, and seven small positive studies sponsored by his own company (these were still unavailable at the last review I could find, in 2003).
In 1990 two academics had their review of the data binned by the journal after Horrobin’s lawyers got involved. In 1995 the Department of Health commissioned a meta-analysis from a renowned epidemiologist. This included ten unpublished studies held by the company which was marketing evening primrose oil. The ensuing scene was only fully described by Professor Hywel Williams a decade later in an editorial for the
It has since been shown, following a wider but undisclosed review, that evening primrose oil is
David Horrobin, I feel duty bound to mention, is the father of the founding director of Equazen, Cathra Kelliher,
In 2007 the GCSE results of the children in the Durham fish-oil year came in. This was an area of failing schools, receiving a huge amount of extra effort and input of all forms. The preceding year, with no fish oil, the results – the number of kids getting five GCSE grades A* to C – had improved by 5.5 per cent. After the fish-oil intervention the rate of improvement deteriorated notably, giving only a 3.5 per cent improvement. This was against a backdrop of a 2 per cent increase in GCSE scores nationally. You would have expected an improvement from a failing region whose schools were receiving a large amount of extra assistance and investment, and you might also remember, as we said, that GCSE results improve nationally every year. If anything, the pills seem to have been associated with a slowing of improvements.
Fish oils, meanwhile, are now the most popular food supplement product in the UK, with annual sales for that single product worth over ?110 million a year. And the Kellihers recently sold Equazen to a major pharmaceutical corporation for an undisclosed sum. If you think I have been overly critical, I would invite you to notice that they win.
In fact, it’s hard to overstate quite how large the fish-oil circus became, over the many years it ran. Professor Sir Robert Winston himself, moustachioed presenter of innumerable ‘science’ programmes for the BBC, personally endorsed a competing omega-3 product, in an advertising campaign which was ultimately terminated by the ASA since it breached their codes on truthfulness and substantiation.
As a testament to the astonishing foolishness of Durham Council, they’ve now even gone to the trouble of changing the wording of this press release on their website, as if that might address the gaping design flaws.
Although you wouldn’t know if I had signed, since I wouldn’t be able to tell you.
While we’re on the subject of ethics, Durham have claimed that to give placebo to half the children would
Professor Patrick Holford
Where do all these ideas about pills, nutritionists and fad diets come from? How are they generated, and propagated? While Gillian McKeith leads the theatrical battalions, Patrick Holford is a very different animal: he is the academic linchpin at the centre of the British nutritionism movement, and the founder of its most important educational establishment, the ‘Institute for Optimum Nutrition’. This organisation has trained most of the people who describe themselves as ‘nutrition therapists’ in the UK. Holford is, in many respects, the originator of their ideas, and the inspiration for their business practices.
Praise is heaped upon him in newspapers, where he is presented as an academic expert. His books are best- sellers, and he has written or collaborated on around forty. They have been translated into twenty languages, and have sold over a million copies worldwide, to practitioners and the public. Some of his earlier works are charmingly fey, with one featuring a
Holford markets himself vigorously as a man of science, and he has recently been awarded a visiting professorship at the University of Teesside (on which more later). At various times he’s had his own slot on daytime television, and hardly a week goes by without him appearing somewhere to talk about a recommendation, his latest ‘experiment’, or a ‘study’: one school experiment (with no control group) has been uncritically covered in two separate, dedicated programmes on
