30 September 2006

Experts

One of the few newspaper articles I look forward to every week is Ben Goldacre on bad science in The Guardian. This week, he has a pop at Dr Gillian McKeith:
"If people want theatrically abusive nutritional advice from someone with qualifications such as a PhD from a non-accredited correspondence course college in the US (which sells its own range of alternative health products online) then that's fine by me, and she's absolutely entitled to call herself doctor, even if she does apparently have some slightly odd ideas about science.
They include, to take the briefest example, nutritional energy and photosynthesis, explaining in her 1.5m copies (gosh) bestselling books that chlorophyll is "high in oxygen"; eating it will oxygenate your blood (not without a searchlight up your bum to drive the photosynthesis of oxygen, I would suggest); and that "each sprouting seed is packed with the nutritional energy needed to create a full grown healthy plant" (I have an apple seed in my left hand and an apple tree in my right, for comparison, as I try to work out what she means)...
But stranger than the attraction to her patients is the attraction for us. We choose, in droves, to watch her bully very fat people on television. People racked with low self-esteem, and guilt, are abused, and told they will die young because of their own actions, then they cry, and we watch it, as entertainment, satisfied it's their own fault. Fatties."

It's a strange world, and television makes it stranger.

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