You Are What You Buy

Ben Goldacre has been reading the PhD thesis of TV nutritionist 'Dr' Gillian McKeith and it turns out that  it is  just as fraudulent and pseudoscientific as the rest of her work.  Entitled “Miracle Superfood: Wild Blue-Green Algae, the nutrient powerhouse that stimulates the immune system, boosts brain power, and guards against disease” it is, according to Goldacre, full of cargo-cult science.  The PhD was from a non-accredited correspondence course at  Clayton College of Natural Health in the USA, in other words, it is a cargo-cult PhD.

Fortunately for TV viewers in the UK, McKeith's 'You Are What You Eat' program on Channel 4 has some fairly stiff competition from the excellent Dr Alice Roberts with 'Don't Die Young' (on BBC2 on Tuesday and Thursdays) and also from 'The Truth About Food' (BBC2, Thursdays), which seemed quite good when I watched it last week, even if the experiments were a bit oversimplified.