Marianne Gutierrez: Health Practitioner: 'Dr' Gillian Mckeith- 'Nutritionist'?

'Dr' Gillian Mckeith- 'Nutritionist'? · 4 January 2006

OK, now I am incensed. I will now speak out against this woman. Slander or no slander I cannot keep quiet any longer. As long ago as last January- Trevor McDonald on his ITV programme: “Tonight with Trevor McDonald” did an expose on Gillian McKeith. I then wrote the article: Medical Quacks

However with Medical Quacks, I did tread softly, softly as my husband kept looking over my shoulder saying: You can’t say that! You can’t say that! So I didn’t.

Now I will. Where does that woman get her ‘facts’ from? Who pays her? Why is she still being given air time? What are Channel 4 and the ITV network thinking of?

Give me some moments I have an appointment to get to, but I just had to get something posted on my website now.

Please email or comment if you have anything to say about this.

I’ll be back!!!!!

Okay, now I can spend some time on this. I am so fed up unravelling the confusions that ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith sows with her advice from her TV programmes and her book(s). I am emailed with confused worries about their health since watching the programme or reading the books one worry was they worried about the cracks on their tongue as ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith said it was due to a lack of Vit B.

First of all I wanted to know what ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith meant by cracks on the tongue and what the email author meant about their cracks. I then went on to explain the deficiencies of Vit B as recorded in Patrick Holford’s book The Optimum Nutritional Bible. A ‘cracked??’ tongue didn’t come into it. Then someone else was worried about the sausages they had been eating as apparently all sausages were bad. I didn’t see the programme last night as I refused to watch it because I have ME and I was worried about my blood pressure – I knew ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith would say something that would be incendiary to me.
I am so fed up with this woman but more fed up with the TV organisations that give her air time and take her seriously.

Who is she? Who are her parents? Where does she come from? Does she have a criminal record? She should have with all the lies and misinformation she has given out. Why hasn’t she been sued? I pay good insurance premiums incase I give out or do anything to harm anyone. Can her insurers cover her damages? Has the TV programme looked into this aspect if she is sued?

‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith is using business tactics to sell and not using the morality code of ethics which all health practitioners adhere to. I first heard of a ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith when I was shopping in Sainsbury’s about 5 or 6 years ago. I was looking at some snack bars full of seeds and nuts and telling me they were ‘good’ for me. I bought one and was ill. I re-read the ingredients list and discovered that they contained things that weren’t good for me, infact they contained things that weren’t ‘good’ for anyone and I never bought her bars again. I can’t remember what the offending ingredient was, it may have been skimmed milk or hydrogenated veg oils or some equally offending ‘unhealthy’ ingredient in her ‘healthy’ bars. I am trying to find out, I can’t get to the shops at the moment being settee/lying flat/ME bound at the moment. I have logged on to her website which is very impressive and she sells the hemp seed bars there but no ingredients list can be accessed. I have emailed Sainsbury’s who also sell her health bar, as they don’t issue the ingredient’s list on this product and I am waiting for them to let me know. (They have got back to me, and cannot tell me the ingredients because it is not their product so they have given me the telephone number of ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith’s shop; I have contacted them and they cannot tell me and have referred me to their warehouse who will contact me.)

Anyway back to the plot. Having vaguely heard of ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith through her product in Sainsbury’s, when I saw her book advertised I assumed that I was looking at someone pretty bona fide as my brain remembered ‘hearing’ something about her before. Her health bars in Sainsbury’s whether bought or not, had been noted and looked at and so a subliminal message was created in my mind. Then lshe aunched her TV programme. However I really do wonder at the TV makers and their own research. Did they do any? Were they bribed by her to make the programme? She is such big business now that it would probably be impossible to pull the plug – a bit similar to the margarine story of many moons ago.

I’ll bore you with this story because it is interesting. Well I think so. In about 1992 no it was 1994, I was studying for my exams in beauty therapy, aromatherapy, massage and aerobics. It was very late. I turned on the TV for a break in my studies and tuned into Channel 4 at about 11pm. I don’t know what the programme was called. It was about Trans Fats. I knew about these because I had just completed an essay on Nutrition and I had researched all sorts of information; Whole Earth had been particularly helpful and it was they who informed me about Trans Fats. The Channel 4 programme ended by saying that if margarine was invented today it would be banned. It was exposing Van den Burgh’s margarine company (I am sure it was they who made Stork and Flora but I cannot find the information now, evenso it is Unilever now who are a VERY big company) who made the majority of margarines then. Vegetable oil is healthier for us than lard and butter which was mainly used in the 1920’s for baking. So using the health propoganda to do with veg oils, Van den Burg ‘found’ a discovery in france of a french man who had managed to make an oil – solid, a method of making the runny veg oils solid. The method pumped more hydrogen molecules into the oil. However in doing this another fat was formed – trans fats. Trans fats in the body stop prostaglandins to be made. Prostaglandins are the precursers to making hormones. So the effect of margarine in the body was to halt the production of hormones making it a very dangerous substance. By the time the health implications of this was eventually understood by the powers that be, it was too late to stop the production. This was due to money and power. There would have been a slump in the market if Van den Burgh’s (or whoever the company was) margarine was exposed.

After the TV programme I was expecting to hear about this in the Newspapers. Never was it mentioned by the media again until towards the end of the 90s. Then Van den burgh (or Unilever) produced a margarine with virtually no trans fats. However watch for words like mono or di-glycerides of fatty acids. These are from hydrogenated oils. Look up the Unilever website. The article here is gobsmacking because it is their margarine that has caused the health problems in the first place. They are blaming lack of exercise and lifestyles but their margarine started it all in 1920.

My warning to you is with any new product or any piece of advice or any survey ask what the motive is behind the production or the advice. What is the money behind it? Who is providing it?

Every one has an ulterior motive. What is my motive for writing this? Several. One is that Mrs Whitehouse died some time ago and I think she is missed. We need a human watchdog to ask questions and expose immorality. The other is I need an outlet while I am ‘recovering’ from ME, if I ever do ‘recover’! And the last one is of-course the more inflammatory articles I write of interest to the public the more people will click on my website and I may begin to earn my living again despite my disability. I see nothing wrong in this – well I do, I feel guilty about it, but to justify myself I think of myself as a reporter who would get paid by a newspaper or periodical. And no-one seems to be concerned about that.

Anyway some slight digression – ‘Dr’ Gillian Mckeith is now big busines, is she too big to put out of business?

I am copying an article by a Ben Goldacre of the Guardian because it is so good:

Dr Gillian McKeith (PhD) continued

Ben Goldacre
Thursday September 30, 2004
The Guardian

Talk about bad science here I once saw a bloke at the opening of a Jackson Pollock exhibition in the Tate, wearing a T-shirt that said: “my cat could do better”. What, you may be wondering, has that got to do with Dr Gillian McKeith (PhD)? Well now. Besides her PhD, which we have already discussed, there were a few other interesting entries on her CV. For example, she is proud to announce under “Professional Associations” that she is a certified member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants (AANC), which certainly sounds impressive. I bet you get a little certificate and everything.

In fact, I know you get a certificate, because I’m holding it in my hand right now. It’s in the name of my cat, Henrietta. I got it in return for $60, and it’s a particular honour since dear, sweet, little Hettie died about a year ago. So, coming in a bit cheaper than Gillian’s non-accredited correspondence course PhD and Masters degrees (although she will have got a discount from “Clayton College of Natural Health” if she ordered them both at once), it looks as if all you need to be a certified member of the AANC is a name, an address, and a spare $60. You don’t need to be human. You don’t even need to be alive. No exam. No check-up on your qualifications. And no assessment of your practice. I guess that could be embarrassing for some of their certified professional members. Presumably, the diploma is there to certify that you have $60.

If you know anyone else who is showing off about being a Professional Certified Member of the AANC, I’d like to hear about it. The only one I can find so far is a man called Dr Bannock who presented Why Weight on Channel 4 and Fat Academy on Discovery. No, I’d never heard of him either. He says he is a “Member of the American Association of Nutrition Consultants (Board Certified Nutrition Consultant)”. Glad you added that bit at the end, Dr Bannock. His website mentions his PhD in Nutritional Physiology, but he doesn’t say where it’s from; his website also features the odd photograph of a stethoscope, although to my disappointment, unlike Hettie, he’s not gone as far as dressing up in it endearingly.

But back to the money: if anybody wants nutritional advice from the decomposing corpse of my ex-cat, I shall be setting up a small shrine at the bottom of the garden, where you can leave chewed mice, ready cash, and offers of a primetime TV series on Channel 4.

Please send your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk

See also another article by Ben Goldacre I like his terminology.

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