‘What I find particularly deceptive is that this obvious skew is not even discussed in the research paper,’ he says. ‘It really makes me question the integrity of the authors and the journal.’ He is talking here, remember, about the Professor of Nutrition at Teesside University and Assistant Dean of Research. Things then deteriorate further. ‘Let’s explore that for a minute with a “conspiracy theory” hat on. Last week pharmaceutical drug sales topped $600 billion. The number one best seller was Lipitor, a statin drug for lowering cholesterol. It brought in $12.9 billion …’
Let us be clear: there is no doubt that there are serious problems with the pharmaceutical industry – I should know, I teach both medical students and doctors on the subject, I write about it regularly in national newspapers, and I am about to walk you through their evils in the next chapter – but the answer to this problem is not bad scholarship, nor is it another substitute set of pills from a related industry. Enough.
How did Holford come to be appointed?
David Colquhoun is Emeritus Professor in Pharmacology at UCL, and runs a magnificently shouty science blog at dcscience. net. Concerned, he obtained the ‘case’ for Professor Holford’s appointment using the Freedom of Information Act, and posted it online. There are some interesting finds. Firstly, Teesside accepts that this is an unusual case. It goes on to explain that Holford is director of the Food for the Brain Foundation, which will be donating funds for a PhD bursary, and that he could help in a university autism clinic.
I am not going to dwell on Holford’s CV – because I want to stay focused on the science – but the one sent to Teesside makes a good starting point for a brief biography. It says that he was at York studying experimental psychology from 1973 to 1976, before studying in America under two researchers in mental health and nutrition (Carl Pfeiffer and Abram Hoffer), and then returning to the UK in 1980 to treat ‘mental health patients with nutritional medicine’. In fact 1975 was the first year that York ran a degree in psychology. Holford actually attended from 1976 to 1979, and after getting a 2:2 degree he began his first job, working as a salesman for the supplement-pill company Higher Nature. So he was treating patients in 1980, one year out of this undergraduate degree. Not a problem. I’m just trying to get this clear in my mind.
He set up the Institute of Optimum Nutrition in 1982, and he was director until 1998: it must therefore have been a touching and unexpected tribute for Patrick in 1995 when the Institute conferred upon him a Diploma in Nutritional Therapy. Since he started but failed to complete his Mphil in nutrition at the University of Surrey twenty years ago, this Dip. ION from his own organisation remains his only qualification in nutrition.
I could go on, but I find it unseemly, and also these are dreary details. OK, one more, but you’ll have to read the rest online:
In 1986 he started researching the effects of nutrition on intelligence, collaborating with Gwillym Roberts, a headmaster and student at ION. This culminated in a randomised controlled trial testing the effects of improved nutrition on children’s IQ – an experiment that was the subject of a
I have this
Let’s get back to his science, post haste. Could Teesside have easily discovered that there were reasons to be concerned about Patrick Holford’s take on science, without deploying any evidence, before they appointed him as a visiting professor? Yes. Simply by reading the brochures from his own company, Health Products for Life. Among the many pills, for example, they might have found his promotion and endorsement of the QLink pendant, at just ?69.99. The QLink is a device sold to protect you from terrifying invisible electromagnetic rays, which Holford is eager to talk about, and it cures many ills. According to Holford’s catalogue:
It needs no batteries as it is ‘powered’ by the wearer – the microchip is activated by a copper induction coil which picks up sufficient micro currents from your heart to power the pendant.
The manufacturers explain that the QLink corrects your ‘energy frequencies’. It has been covered in praise by
Last summer I bought one and took it to Camp Dorkbot, an annual festival for dorks held – in a joke taken too far – at a scout camp outside Dorking. Here, in the sunshine, some of the nation’s more childish electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any ‘frequencies’ emitted, but no luck. Then we did what any dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open. Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore it is not powered by the coil, as claimed.
The eight copper pads did have some intriguing-looking circuit-board tracks coming out of them, but on close inspection these were connected to absolutely nothing. You might call them ‘decorative’. I should mention, in the name of accuracy, that I’m not clear if I can call something a ‘circuit board’ when there is no ‘circuit’.
Finally, there is a modern surface-mount electronic component soldered to the centre of the device, prominently on display through the clear plastic cover. It looks impressive, but whatever it is, it is connected to absolutely nothing. Close examination with a magnifying glass, and experiments with a multimeter and an oscilloscope, revealed that this component on the ‘circuit board’ was a zero-ohm resistor. This is a resistor that has no resistance: a bit of wire in a tiny box. It sounds like a useless component, but they’re actually quite useful for bridging a gap between adjacent tracks on a circuit board. (I feel I should apologise for knowing that.)
Now, such a component is not cheap. We must assume that this is an extremely high-quality surface-mount resistor, manufactured to very high tolerances, well calibrated, and sourced in small quantities. You buy them on paper tape in seven-inch reels, each reel containing about 5,000 resistors, and you could easily pay as much as ?0.005 for such a resistor. Sorry, I was being sarcastic. Zero ohm resistors are extremely cheap. That’s the QLink pendant. No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is also connected to nothing.
Teesside is only part of the story. Our main reason for showing an interest in Patrick Holford is his phenomenal influence on the nutritionist community in the UK. As I have mentioned, I have a huge respect for the people I am writing about in this book, and I am happy to flatter Holford by saying that the modern phenomenon of nutritionism which pervades every aspect of the media is in large part his doing, through the graduates of his phenomenally successful Institute for Optimum Nutrition, where he still teaches. This institute has trained the majority of self-styled nutrition therapists in the UK, including Vicki Edgson from
We’ve seen some examples of the standard of Holford’s scholarship. What happens in his Institute? Are its students, we might wonder, being tutored in the academic ways of its founder?
As an outsider, it’s hard to tell. If you visit the academic-sounding website, www.ion.ac.uk (registered before the current rules on academic .ac.uk web addresses), you won’t find a list of academics on the staff, or research programmes in progress, in the way that you would, say, for the Institute for Cognitive Neurosciences in London. Nor will you find a list of academic publications. When I rang up the press office once to get one, I was told about some magazine articles, and then when I explained what I really meant, the press officer went away, and came back, and told me that ION was ‘a research institute, so they don’t have time for academic papers and stuff’.
Slowly, more so since Holford’s departure as head (he still teaches there), the Institute of Optimum Nutrition has managed to squeeze some respectability out of its office space in south-west London. It has managed to get its diploma properly accredited, by the University of Luton, and it now counts as a ‘foundation degree’. With one more year of study, if you can find anyone to take you – that is, the University of Luton – you can convert your ION diploma into a full BSc science degree.
If, in casual conversation with nutritionists, I question the standards of the ION, this accreditation is frequently raised, so we might look at it very briefly. Luton, previously the Luton College of Higher Education, now the University of Bedfordshire, was the subject of a special inspection by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in 2005. The QAA is there to ‘safeguard the academic standards and quality of higher education in the UK’.
When the QAA’s report was published, the
