Gillian mckeith who is

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. McKeith's pseudo-academic work is like the rituals of the cargo cult: the form is superficially right, 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 bit very funny.

It makes me quite depressed to think about her, sitting up, perhaps alone, studiously and earnestly typing this stuff out. One window into her world is the extraordinary way she responds to criticism: with legal threats and blatantly, outrageously misleading statements, emitted with such regularity that it's reasonable to assume she will do the same thing with this current kerfuffle over her use of the title "doctor".

So that you know how to approach the rebuttals to come, let's look at McKeith's rebuttals of the recent past. Three months ago she was censured by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency MHRA for illegally selling a rather tragic range of herbal sex pills called Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex, advertised as shown by a "controlled study" to promote sexual satisfaction, and sold with explicit medicinal claims.

She was ordered to remove the products from sale immediately. She complied - the alternative would have been prosecution - but in response, McKeith's website announced that the sex pills had been withdrawn because of "the new EU licensing laws regarding herbal products".

She engaged in 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. The information on the McKeith website is incorrect. Now, once would be unfortunate, but this is an enduring pattern. When McKeith was first caught out on the ridiculous and erroneous claims of her CV - she claimed, for example, to have a PhD from the reputable American College of Nutrition - her representatives suggested that this was a mistake, made by a Spanish work experience kid, who posted the wrong CV.

Except the very same claim about the American College of Nutrition was also in one of her books from several years previously. That's a long work experience stint. 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.

I have the certificate hanging in my loo. Perhaps it didn't even occur to the journalist that McKeith could be wrong. More likely, of course, in the tradition of nervous journalists, I suspect 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. But those who criticise McKeith have reason to worry.

McKeith goes after people, and nastily. She has a libel case against the Sun over comments they made in that has still not seen much movement. But the Sun is a large, wealthy institution, and it can protect itself with a large and well-remunerated legal team. Others can't. A charming but - forgive me - 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 a fantastically funny website called Eclectech for hosting a silly animation of McKeith 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, though these things shouldn't be difficult or complicated. If anyone wanted to check my degrees, memberships, or affiliations, then they could call up the institutions, and get instant confirmation: job done. If you said I wasn't a doctor, I wouldn't sue you; I'd roar with laughter. If you contact the Australasian College of Health Sciences Portland, US where McKeith has a "pending diploma in herbal medicine", they say they can't tell you anything about their students.

What kind of organisations are these? But McKeith's most heinous abuse of legal chill is exemplified by a nasty little story from , when she threatened a retired professor of nutritional medicine for questioning her ideas.

Shortly after the publication of McKeith's book Living Food for Health, before she was famous, John Garrow wrote an article about some of the rather bizarre scientific claims she was making. 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 In fact, 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. Anyway, 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 it was 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 enzymes". McKeith even offered "combination living food powder for clinical purposes" in case people didn't want to change their diet, and she used this for "clinical trials" with patients at her clinic.

Garrow was sceptical of her claims. Apart from anything else, as emeritus professor of human nutrition at the University of London, he knew that human animals have their own digestive enzymes, and a plant enzyme you eat is likely to be digested like any other protein.

As any professor of nutrition, and indeed many GCSE biology students, could happily tell you. Garrow read the book closely, as have I. These "clinical trials" seemed to be a few anecdotes in her book about how incredibly well McKeith's patients felt after seeing her. No controls, no placebo, no attempt to quantify or measure improvements.

So Garrow made a modest proposal, and I am quoting it in its entirety, partly because it is a rather elegantly written exposition of the scientific method by an extremely eminent academic authority on the science of nutrition, but mainly because I want you to see how politely he stated his case. My hypothesis is that any benefits which Dr McKeith has observed in her patients who take her living food powder have nothing to do with their enzyme content.

If I am correct, then patients given powder which has been heated above F for 20 minutes will do just as well as patients given the active powder. However, if Dr McKeith is correct, it should be easy to deduce from the boosting of energy, etc, which patients received the active powder and which the inactivated one.

I hope that Dr McKeith's instincts, as a fellow-scientist, will impel her to accept this challenge. If we carry out the test, and I am proved wrong, she will, of course, collect my stake, and I will publish a fulsome apology in this newsletter.

If the results show that she is wrong I will donate her stake to HealthWatch [a medical campaigning group], and suggest that she should tell the 1, patients on her waiting list that further research has shown that the claimed benefits of her diet have not been observed under controlled conditions. We scientists have a noble tradition of formally withdrawing our publications if subsequent research shows the results are not reproducible - don't we?

Thank you for your. Klara Tirana, Albania March 24, Dear Gillian, I truly love your program and learn something new from each episode. Gillian, I love how tough you are on nutrition and diet and your show is help me and my husband see what NOT to do. We need more people out there like you. Love the show. Tani March 24, Dear Gillian, My partner and I started watching your show and it is changing our lives for the better. We absolutely love the program and info on good eating habits.

Thank you so much. John USA March 24, Dear Gillian, Just to let you know that across the pond you have a student of your healthful turnarounds. For that, I thank you. I am a young man of 65 who still teaches kindergarten students. Dan Phoenix, Arizona March 24, Dear Gillian, We have been following your recommendations in our personal life since the turn of the century.

Thank you very much for bringing to us the knowledge that has really improved our lives. Vijay March 24, Dear Gillian, From the bottom of my heart first: Thank you for all information and inspiration. You have the kind ideology about food and health I always believed in, but wasn?

You have integrated all that matter in Your fantastic concept. I have seen most of your shows. This was one. TfL gives blunt response to an angry complaint over line closure. Man who went to live in woods 40 years ago reveals what life is like. A professor is using Pornhub to market his math tutoring lessons.

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