aeroplanes land.
Like the rituals of the cargo cult, the form of McKeith’s
pseudo-academic work is superficially correct: 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 very funny. It makes me quite depressed to think about
her, sitting up, perhaps alone, studiously and earnestly
typing this stuff out.
Should you feel sorry for her? One window into her world
is the way in which she has responded to criticism: with
statements that seem to be, well, wrong. It’s cautious to
assume that she will do the same thing with anything that I
write here, so in preparation for the rebuttals to come, let’s
look at some of the rebuttals from the recent past.
In 2007, as has been noted, she was censured by the
MHRA for selling a rather crass range of herbal sex pills
called Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex,
advertised as having been shown by a ‘controlled study’ to
promote sexual satisfaction, and sold with explicit
medicinal claims. They were illegal for sale in the UK. She
was ordered to remove the products from sale
immediately. She complied—the alternative would have
been prosecution—but her website announced that the sex
pills had been withdrawn because of ‘the new EU licensing
laws regarding herbal products’. She engaged in a spot of
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.
Nonsense. I contacted the MHRA, and they said: ‘This
has nothing to do with new EU regulations. The information
on the McKeith website is incorrect.’ Was it a mistake? ‘Ms
McKeith’s organisation had already been made aware of
the requirements of medicines legislation in previous years;
there was no reason at all for all the products not to be
compliant with the law.’ They went on. ‘The Wild Pink Yam
and Horny Goat Weed products marketed by McKeith
Research Ltd were never legal for sale in the UK.’

citations at the back.
Holford markets himself vigorously as a man of science,
and he has recently been awarded a visiting professorship
at the University of Teesside (on which more later). At
various times he’s had his own slot on daytime television,
and hardly a week goes by without him appearing
somewhere to talk about a recommendation, his latest
‘experiment’, or a ‘study’: one school experiment (with no
control group) has been uncritically covered in two
separate, dedicated programmes on Tonight with Trevor
MacDonald, ITV’s peak-hour investigative slot, and that
sits alongside his other appearances on This Morning,
B B C Breakfast, Horizon, BBC News, GMTV, London
Tonight, Sky News, CBS News in America, The Late Late
Show in Ireland, and many more. According to the British
media establishment, Professor Patrick Holford is one of
our leading public intellectuals: not a vitamin-pill salesman
working in the $50-billion food-supplement industry—a fact
which is very rarely mentioned, if ever—but an inspiring
academic, embodying a diligent and visionary approach to
scientific evidence. Let us see what calibre of work is
required for journalists to accord you this level of authority in
front of the nation.
AIDS, cancer and vitamin pills
I first became fully aware of Holford in a bookshop in
Wales. It was a family holiday, I had nothing to write about,
and it was New Year. Like a lifesaver, here was a copy of
his New Optimum Nutrition Bible, the 500,000-copy best-
seller. I seized it hungrily, and looked up the big killers. First
I found a section heading which explains that ‘people who
take vitamin C live four times longer with cancer’. Excellent
stuff.
I looked up AIDS (this is what I call ‘the AIDS test’). Here
is what I found on page 208: ‘AZT, the first prescribable
anti-HIV drug, is potentially harmful, and proving less
effective than vitamin C Now, AIDS and cancer are very
serious issues indeed. When you read a dramatic claim