How many people hate gillian mckeith

She even does this in the book Miracle Superfood, which, we are told, is the published form of her PhD. Her reference for this experimental data is a magazine called Health Store News.

To me this is cargo cult science, as the great Professor Richard Feynman described Melanesian religious activities 30 years ago: "During the war they saw aeroplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. 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the alternative would have been prosecution - but in response, McKeith's website announced that the sex pills had been withdrawn because of "the new EU licensing laws regarding herbal products".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. Get Me Out Of Here! Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp. November 19 PM. Facebook Twitter Email. Video: Flaming lorry drives through Coleraine. If you put yourself on a prime time TV show and get paid huge amounts of money, I don't think you can call it bullying.

While McKeith struggles with public opprobrium in Australia, ITV officials have reportedly asked staff maintaining her website to remove the logo for I'm A Celebrity from her home page since, reportedly, there was no licence to use it. It appears McKeith is hoping to use the show's high profile to relaunch her television career, which dwindled not long after her decision to stop calling herself Dr McKeith — a change that followed informal discussions with the Advertising Standards Authority and criticism from the Guardian's science writer Ben Goldacre.

While many viewers might be unaware of her opponents in the scientific community, word seems to have spread about the controversy surrounding her specific credentials. The scientist Simon Singh, co-author of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, said: "I meet people who dedicate their lives to understanding, furthering and communicating the science around nutrition and health, and then there is Gillian McKeith. I don't make a habit of voting in reality shows, but in Gillian's case I made an exception.

Back in the jungle McKeith remains the butt of viewer displeasure and she will, almost certainly, be subjected to further trials if she decides to stay on in the reality show's camp. The former All Saints singer arrived in the jungle in and found herself on the pointy prongs of public loathing when she rowed with contestants and cried almost all the time. She walked after she was chosen to do a fifth trial.

In the former newsreader was selected to take part in a record six consecutive bushtucker trial. She was shut in a box of snakes, and lowered into a tunnel of rats. The model was back in the show in