Nonsense on Stilts 2017

Another year, another round-up of the dangerous and the daft. There was so much to choose from this year so this is just the tip of the iceberg of nonsense on stilts. As ever, it’s divided into health, diet and general craziness.

HEALTH

The Queen of Quacks, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop business has spewed out some terrible old cobblers this year, some of which is potentially very harmful. Here is her nonsense about toxic tampons debunked by the excellent Dr Jen Gunter.

Advice given at her ‘health’ conference can be fatal and just in case you thought it couldn’t get any more insane, she is now selling psychic vampire repellent. Yes, really. 

Also in America, anti-vaxxers offered $100,000 for proof that vaccines work. Oh dear. The fact that they’re alive to perpetrate such arrant nonsense is proof enough, isn’t it? One word, anti-vaxxers: polio. Ever been in an iron lung? No. Why is that?

If further proof were needed, the tedious and notorious anti-vaxxer Wakefield managed to cause a measles epidemic in the US.

Earlier in the year it looked like homeopathy would escape an NHS prescribing ban despite cutbacks and despite the Chief Medical Officersaying it’s ‘rubbish’. But reason and science have for once prevailed. NHS England has called for homeopathy to be blacklisted as a useless waste of money. Very well done to the Good Thinking Society for their campaigning work on this.

Vets also joined the campaign against homeopathy and then later in the year the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons issued a new position statement on the veterinary use of complementary and alternative medicines, homeopathy in particular, saying that vets must offer treatments that "are underpinned by a recognised evidence base or sound scientific principles." The new position statement makes it very clear that homeopathy falls below this benchmark: "Homeopathy exists without a recognised body of evidence for its use. Furthermore, it is not based on sound scientific principles."

One of the newer health fads is turmeric. Eat it, drink it, medicate with it. Harmless nonsense for people with more money than sense? Not when a naturopath kills a woman with a turmeric injection or when claims are made for it curing cancer.

I had an awkward conversation not so long ago with a woman who swears by turmeric lattes every day and demanded to know how I dare challenge ‘all the thousands of research papers’ that show it works. To her I say: show me this evidence. It could be a long wait.

And while we’re on spices, cinnamon won’t help you magically lose weight either. Sorry. 

The long-enduring myth that women synchronise periods was debunked. There is no ‘dominant super uterus in a group of women that makes everyone adjust their cycles’. So Super Uterus won’t be making an appearance in the next DC movie, damn it. She’d be so much more interesting than Superman, the most boring of all the supers.

As if UKIP wasn’t bad enough, one of their ‘politicians’ now sells industrial strength bleach as a medical cure at £22 for 60ml. David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London, said “You don’t absorb oxygen through your stomach. There’s not the slightest reason to think it works for anything.” Assemble your own joke using the words UKIP, toxic, liars and why is Farage constantly on the news when they have zero seats in Parliament?

A wealthy autism charity is risking children’s lives, offering to pay for them to attend clinics offering pseudoscientific treatments and bogus diets, and it appears to endorse links between vaccines and autism. One of the treatments promoted is MMS, which the National Autism Society describes as a “bleach banned for human consumption”. There are claims it has been linked to at least one death. The Food Standards Agency has warned about its use, calling it an “industrial-strength bleach”. Yes, we’re looking at you, Mr UKIP.

There is yet more evidence that chiropractic is harmful and potentially deadly, and now chiropractors trying to scare women about our clothes, saying skinny jeans, handbags and big fluffy hoods are wrecking our backs. Dr Mary O'Keeffe, a back pain expert at the University of Limerick, says their research is "complete scaremongering and there is no scientific evidence to support any of it".

Earlier this year, a quack claiming to cure cancer by Skype (for money, of course) was found guilty under the Cancer Act and is now facing jail.

The spread of fake health ‘news’ is putting lives at risk. Some of the claims may contravene the Cancer Act 1939: you can report any claims that break the law to Advertising Standards.

DIET

I’m happy to report that the backlash against the vile, smug, judgemental and dangerous clean eating movement is gaining momentum. But nature abhors a vacuum so as soon as one diet fad dies, another rises to take its place. But calling them diets is so last year. Now it’s all about Wellness. There are endless books, videos and evangelists promoting their own brands of ‘better living’ which are really just diets wrapped up in very expensive merchandising and ingredients. Because wellness means thinness. There are no overweight Wellness gurus.

Celebrity-endorsed fad diets (sorry, Wellness programmes) are nothing new. Lord Byron’s apple cider vinegar diet was taken up by his many fans in the early nineteenth century and now it’s back. But without the poetry. Which is a blessing.

The low fat versus low carb battle rages on with both sides claiming the other will kill you. Some of the research is very flawed and the screaming headlines don’t help.  There is more and more conspiracy talk about Big Sugar.  The sugar lobby is undeniably powerful but conspiracy theorists have attributed it god-like powers to ensure that we poor fools think saturated fat is the devil. 

As Anthony Warner, aka the Angry Chef, says, this would require ‘paying off the medical establishment, the World Health Organisation, numerous charities, public health bodies and nutrition researchers around the world, and keep producing systematic reviews that show links between consumption of saturated fats and increased risk of heart disease.’ 

The amount of rage generated by daring to question the low carbers should set off the alarm bells that this is not just about food – as Dr Margaret McCartney found out to her cost on Twitter when she dared to write this reasonable piece about the lack of evidence. This is my piece on the cult-like ferocity of the low-carbers.

What no one has pointed out is that if we care about the planet, we should be eating fewer animal products, not more. High protein/high fat means more eggs, fish/seafood, meat and dairy when we should be aiming for a more plant-based diet. And shouldn’t we give at least a moment’s thought to the fact that there are still more underweight 5-19 year olds in the world than obese ones?

There’s a myth doing the rounds that sugar and other carbs ‘feed’ cancer. They don’t.

Do artificial sweeteners cause dementia and strokes? No.  

Does sugar cause or worsen Alzheimer’s? According to the tabloids, yes it does. According to the Alzheimer’s Society “What we don’t know is whether changes in brain glucose metabolism play a role in causing or worsening Alzheimer’s disease or whether the changes are just a by-product of damage already occurring to brain cells.”

Another potentially dangerous diet fad is the Ketogenic diet, which claims to cure everything from cancer to Alzheimer’s to pretty much anything you can name. Here’s a good video explaining what it is and why it is not a miracle (yes, he is a vegan but everything he says about keto stands up).

Yet another bit of dangerous garbage is the idea that everything bad that happens can be cured with an alkaline diet. And while we’re at it, you can’t cure cancer with ‘alkaline’ baking soda either.

Back to the Angry Chef who this time gets quite rightly angry about PETA claiming dairy products cause autism.

The Pioppi diet has gained popularity this year. As the British Dietetic Association commented: “the authors may well be the only people in the history of the planet who have been to Italy and come back with a diet named after an Italian village that excludes pasta, rice and bread – but includes coconuts”. Here’s conclusive proof that coconuts have never been part of a traditional European diet.

Do we need more protein in our diets? Only if you want to make very expensive wee wee.

RANDOM NONSENSE

A Church says starve for three days to cure homosexuality and that people are just claiming to be gay to get attention because they see celebrities doing it. This really doesn’t help when nearly half of lesbian, gay, bi and trans young people are bullied for being LGBT at school and when homophobic attacks in the UK rose by 147% in three months after the Brexit vote.

On a more cheery note there’s the daftness of dopamine dressing – dress yourself happy with bright colours. Unless you’re me and hate them. It’s yet another case of if you believe something you make it true, like wearing lucky pants can make you feel more confident and so perform better.

For a change, a bit of abuse of history instead of science: why lazy journos comparing Trump with Roman emperors are wrong.

Slimming pants! This is hilarious. There is no way that any of these claims stand up – detox, lose cellulite, lose weight, all the usual suspects. Plus, you look like a twat. No wonder they're on offer.

Men are better at understanding projection and therefore physics because they have to learn to pee standing up, according to three 'scientists'. “Playful urination practices – from seeing how high you can pee to games such as Peeball (where men compete using their urine to destroy a ball placed in a urinal) – may give boys an advantage over girls when it comes to physics,” the academics wrote. They said this is significant, since the physics curriculum often uses projectile motion as the starting point for more sophisticated mechanics concepts such as force, energy and momentum.

If only the average man's aim was that good. And I’m not sure about the phrase ‘playful urination practices’. Oh, and correlation, causation, yadda yadda.

Not so funny is this: the United Nations pulled staff out of two districts in southern Malawi where a vampire scare triggered mob violence in which at least five people were killed.

No werewolf sightings this year but belief in ghosts is on the increase in America. Add your own Trump-based joke.

Eight out of ten UK water companies still use dowsing rods to 'find' water. Yes, really. I often consult the spirits of the dead for cooking tips. Who doesn’t? 

A lot of the media and some skeptics have dismissed dowsing as mediaeval. Here’s a good explanation of why that’s a lazy assumption. Have they looked at a cathedral or an illuminated manuscript lately? Mediaeval people were not morons, they just had less access to information than we do – although some of us still choose to ignore it. What’s more, ‘records of dowsing do not begin until the 16th century, and its popularity does not appear to have peaked until the 19th and 20th centuries’.

DNA sampling reveals that nine yeti specimens were in fact eight bears and a dog. Damn. 

Finally, an ancient fairy curse causes dips in the road in Ireland, according to an Irish MP. I love this one and really wish it were true. He said “if someone told me to go out and knock a fairy fort or touch it, I would starve first.” The council’s road department said the dip was due to an “underlying subsoil/geotechnical problem.” They’ll be sorry when their socks go missing and their cows’ milk dries up.

That’s it for another year. To help inoculate yourself against nonsense, this is a very good primer on how to read and understand a scientific paper and this is a handy 12 point guide to spotting bad science. Happy hunting.

Join us at London Skeptics in the Pub for a monthly dose of sanity. 

Don't Put That In Your Mouth!

There have always been fad diets and people making money out of them, like Atkins or the grapefruit diet or swallowing tapeworm eggs. It’s getting harder to know who to trust as the diet messiahs compete for our money, harder to hack through the jungle of lies, empty promises and dangerous bullshit to find the truth. And lately the diet world has been getting vicious.

Weight loss means that using more calories than you consume. As simple as that. Cutting out a whole food group restricts calories, weight loss happens, but as soon as you go back to eating a healthy balanced diet or back to your unhealthy one, the weight comes back.

Nature abhors a vacuum so as soon as one fad loses its shine, another is spawned to take its place, along with all the expensive accessories – courgette rice, gluten free everything, spiralisers. That’s the marketplace in action.

The current crop includes paleo, LCHF (low carb-high fat, sometimes called low carb-high protein), ketogenic, clean eating.

Some messiahs are alert to public weariness with diet books and have rebranded their Gospel as ‘wellness’. Every single Wellness lifestyle is really a diet in disguise. All the Wellness messiahs are skinny and glossy and young.

Why are these diets a problem?

If dieting worked, there would only need to be one diet, everyone would do it and no one would put the weight back on. But that doesn’t happen. We have a short attention span. We want a quick fix, we all want to feel shiny and special. When one diet doesn’t work, we move on to the next one that promises us salvation. Life as a diet messiah is short. There’s always another one waiting in the wings so you have to make big claims to get attention and excommunicate the competition as heretics.

 The problems start when essential nutrients or dietary elements are being missed – vitamins, minerals, fibre – or an excess of fat/protein raises risks of conditions like kidney stones, osteoporosis, heart disease, liver disease and so on.

Fibre is the orphan child of many current diets. Without fibre it is very hard to poo. Pooing should not be under-rated as long-term constipation can have serious consequences. It’s also a natural detox, along with peeing. So regular trips to the loo will save you buying all those detox products and laxatives (but not prunes as the European Food Safety Authorityruled that they do not have a laxative effect). 

And of course carbs are cheap. Baked beans on wholemeal toast is a balanced, poo-friendly meal but it has no swank factor. Your Instagram followers will not be impressed.

How to tell crap from Christmas?

There’s a link between fad diets and fake news – they look plausible, they use science words, they fit with what you would like to be true and it takes an effort to research if they are genuine. It’s getting harder to tell crap from Christmas.

Once you’ve invested in something financially and emotionally, you’re likely to defend it whatever the evidence. Cognitive bias means you’ll ignore the evidence against your beliefs and cling onto anything that appears to confirm them.

You’re part of a tribe. You read the book, buy the products, join the online forums, identify with skinny glossy, hench celebs doing the same diet, Instagram your meals and get thousands of Likes, worship at the church of your chosen messiah. And your tribe hates all the other tribes, especially the Science Tribe who will insist on pissing on your chips (which are made of lard if you’re on the low carb diet).

Do not dare to question the Chosen One or we will smite you with the wrath of social media. It’s all gone a bit Old Testament.

I’ve been harangued by women for daring to question their proselytising of paleo and of turmeric as a miracle ingredient in everything.

Margaret McCartney, who is a real medical doctor (unlike me), had the temerity to point out that fad diets like LCHF are not a miracle fix and received a shitstorm of hatred on Twitter.

Where’s the harm?

The risks of the LCHF diet are not hard to find despite the fact that its advocates can get pretty vicious. 

Clean eating advocates are particularly vocal with their loathsome conflation of moral value and food which, in some cases leads to orthorexia and other eating disorders. 

Sometimes dietary claims get even nastier, like the claims that dairy products cause autism and anyone feeding their child dairy is risking their lives. 

Then they get nastier still, like the claim that the ketogenic diet can cure cancer.

It can’t.

  

Who can we trust?

Just as with other forms of fake news, it can be hard to know who to trust. The Pioppi diet is best described as ‘a superficial lifestyle guide based on distorted evidence’ even if one the authors of the diet book is a cardiologist. Most people would think it’s safe to believe a cardiologist. But as the author of this article points out: ‘Pasta is as central to the Italian diet as potatoes are to Britain’s. So too is bread. This is the elephant in the room for anyone trying to pretend that Italians eat a low carb diet’.

There’s another cardiology scientist recommending eating a lot of salt against all expert advice. Trust me, I’m a doctor? Maybe not. 

Sometimes the boundary between saints and sinners is blurred. For example, in this video, a vegan looks at the evidence for the dangers of the keto diet. One of the experts he cites is called Paleo Mom. They both have an agenda but the science is right – keto can be very dangerous, especially for children. Because it’s not just middle class adults wasting their money and messing with their bodies.

Other fake news tactics the diet messiahs use include taking evidence and distorting it, making the false link between correlation and causation, cherry-picking data, using facts out of context, ignoring confounding factors that don’t suit them, picking an arbitrary period in evolution for which the evidence is obscure and declaring that is our most ‘natural’ diet.

It gets crazier

The next step is the conspiracy theory. The sugar lobby is undeniably powerful but conspiracy theorists have attributed it god-like powers to ensure that we poor fools think saturated fat is the devil. 

As Antony Warner, the Angry Chef, says, this would require ‘paying off the medical establishment, the World Health Organisation, numerous charities, public health bodies and nutrition researchers around the world, and keep producing systematic reviews that show links between consumption of saturated fats and increased risk of heart disease.’

Once a conspiracy theory gets going, any evidence against it is taken as part of the conspiracy. The believers think that they and they alone know the truth. They feel powerful and clever and smug. And presumably constipated.

Yes, the parallels with religion are all there, the In Group and the Out Group, the access to privileged information, the righteousness, the smiting of enemies, feeling persecuted, the Gospels (the lucrative book deal is the Holy Grail of the Messiahs), the Way, the Truth and the Life. There’s no point being Saved unless others are Damned. Preferably on Twitter.

What’s the answer?

How are people to know what is a healthy diet and what isn’t? It’s so much easier to join a tribe and buy the book/watch the videos/follow a messiah on social media than to go and see a clinical dietitian.

Basically, if a diet involves eating less saturated fat, cutting out processed carbs but keeping whole grains, fruit and veg, reducing salt and sugar, reducing portion size and getting some exercise, it’s a good one. Basically, it’s just common sense. Which doesn’t make anyone any money.

Most people aren’t stupid but society puts pressure on us all to be thin and healthy. Desperation can lead us to make bad choices. The Internet should make it easier to get access to good information but the proliferation of messiahs makes it so much harder. They are all false prophets of diet salvation. We need to become diet atheists.

Should you join a gym in January? No.

January is traditionally the time when we're supposed to make health-based resolutions - lose weight, drink less, quit smoking, get fit. Weight Watchers and their imitators ramp up their ad campaign and even Sainsbury's is selling rowing machines.

If your resolution is to join a gym - forget it.

Don't get me wrong, I love the gym. I'm there four mornings a week.

But there are lots of reasons why you shouldn't join a gym.

1. It's expensive. You're looking at around £500 a year for a decent gym. Some are cheaper if you pay for the whole year up front, others let you spread the payment with monthly direct debit. You may think that paying all in one go will make you commit. It won't. You'll end up having arguments with yourself about why you should go and why there are excellent reasons for not going and damn, I feel guilty and I'll really go next week, honestly, just shut up and let me eat this pizza in peace. Personality disorders will ensue.

Monthly payments might seem a safer option but many people don't get around to cancelling their DD and some gyms don't make it easy to quit once they've signed you up. And on top of the annual fee, you may well have to pay a joining fee which has no purpose other than gouging more money out of you to pay for the huge effort of putting a bit of data into a computer. Gyms rely on people joining in January but more than that, they rely on them not going more than a few times. Figures vary, but up to 60% of people drop out before six months. If everyone who joined a gym went and kept going, you wouldn't be able to get in the door. If you're part of that 60%, thank you for paying for my gym to get lots of new equipment that I can use in peace.

2. Guilt/punishment. A woman in my gym said to me 'When I'm as slim as you, I can stop coming'. This is a common attitude - exercise as penance or punishment. I pointed out to her that the only reason I stay in shape is that I keep going. She wasn't happy. A lot of women (and it is mostly women) see exercise as something to be endured to achieve a goal - generally weight loss. They hate every moment. Exercise speeds up weight loss but it's still going to take time. I've seen women weighing themselves after every session as if they might magically have dropped five kilos just by flogging themselves half to death on the step machine for 40 minutes.

Exercise burns calories but not very many. It works by perking up your metabolism so you burn more calories even when resting. So a weekend of beer and pizza cannot be atoned for in the gym on Monday morning. If you weigh around 155 pounds, an hour of vigorous aerobics or weight training could burn around 490 calories. One slice of pepperoni pizza has around 350 calories. That's one slice. You need to burn 3,500 calories more than you take in to lose one pound. So if you ran really really fast for over seven hours and ate nothing, you might lose a pound. Or die.

3. It's hard. If exercise was easy, everyone would do it and we'd all look like athletes. It takes time. Muscles do not just ping out overnight. That's why so many competitive body builders use steroids. I worked in a gym for a few years while I was researching my PhD and taught weight training circuits. I watched sane, sensitive men become a competitive, grunting mass of testosterone as soon as they got near the big muscly men. They'd try to lift the heaviest weights they could find, get disheartened that they didn't turn into Mr Universe and give up. Or do themselves a mischief.

4. It's time consuming. If you're going to be in the gym three or four times a week, it has to become part of your life. You have to get up early or make time in the evenings and weekends. You'll also have to lug a heavy bag full of stinky clothes around with you.

5. The gym isn't for everyone. Weight training, cardio work or classes don't suit everyone. Some people find it hard to work out alone, others don't like doing it with other people. And not everyone can cope with the changing rooms. This may sound like an odd thing to say, but some women are so painfully unhappy with their bodies that they writhe around under a towel to get changed and won't shower in the communal showers if the individual cubicles are busy. I can't speak for men as I've never been in a men's changing room (damn it) but I'm told there are man-type pressures too, mostly around eye contact while naked and getting your nob out in front of other men. You will have to get naked in front of others at some point, if only for a moment. You will also go bright red, get all sweaty and your hair will look terrible. Gyms are full of mirrors so you will see yourself looking like crap from every angle. This can be hard to take if there's a cute guy/girl working out next to you but if you're more interested in pulling than pumping, go to the pub.

Obviously, some people do join a gym, love it and stick with it. I did. It's part of my life and I don't have to think about it, I just do it - and enjoy it. This doesn't make me a Good Person, it makes me someone who suits the gym.

6. It's January. It's horrible outside, especially early in the morning when it's cold, dark and probably wet as you head to the gym. And cold, dark and probably wet when you leave work. Setting yourself tough targets at this time of year can be pretty unrealistic, a triumph of faith over reason. Give yourself a break. Start with something you may actually achieve. Go for a fast walk for half an hour three or four times a week for three months. If you can't manage that, there's no point doing anything more demanding (or expensive). Your credit card is already weeping after Christmas. If you can manage it, do you still want to join a gym? There are lots of other ways to exercise that may suit you better.

7. Suck it and see. A lot of private gyms do free tasters, a one day or sometimes three day pass. Just going to a gym, looking around and getting the sales pitch isn’t enough. You need to go at the time you are planning to go to see how crowded it is, who else is in there (big scary men hogging the Smith machine or women hogging the step machines, for example) and whether what’s on offer really suits you. Council-run gyms don’t tend to do this; for health and safety reasons they won’t let you loose on your own without doing an induction course. This applies even if you’re a regular gym user so it’s not so much about making sure you don’t injure yourself as getting more money out of you.

Chat to the staff while you’re there. Do they know their stuff? Do they look you up and down and raise an eyebrow? Do they give a toss? Do they speak something approaching English?

Then sniff the changing room. If it smells like something died in there, walk away.

8. Don't say to me 'I really should join a gym' or 'I've been to the gym three times now' or even 'Can you design me an exercise programme to do at home?' You may be the exception to the rule but I can pretty much guarantee that if I spend time and effort designing a workout for you and teaching you how to do it, you'll do it for a week. Or maybe two. And then make excuses every time you see me. And then hate me because I make you feel guilty. I really don't need it.

9. If you ignore everything I've said and join a gym - hoorah! If you're still going regularly in a year's time, let me know and we'll have a really big cake. Because gym + cake = balanced lifestyle. It works for me.

What Gillian Did Next

Gillian McKeith is back. Her new show, Eat Yourself Sexy, starts a 13 episode run this weekend on the W Network - in Canada.


In the show, she challenges her charges to reveal the sexier woman within - in just eight weeks. The trailer shows the husband of one of the women who gets the McKeith treatment; he says "She was Little Miss Sexy. Honestly, how sexy is she now? A three." She responds with "If he was having an affair, I couldn't really blame him". He is neither thin nor particularly sexy himself. The plucky Scot has crossed the Atlantic to help.


The show has been widely reviewed and hyped in the Canadian media. McKeith is described on one website as 'the renowned Scottish born nutritionist'.


The site with the trailer has the following text: According to Dr Gillian McKeith, "Good food equals good sex' hence the title of the series". The good doctor is on a mission - to whip drab, frumpy, libido-less people into sexy shape through diet, exercise and more than a little of her own pointed commentary. Eat Yourself Sexy uses clever devices such as a head-turn meter that counts every time a head turns when a central character walks down the street (before and after going through Dr McKeith's sexifying regimen), but it's the doctor's snappy no-holds-barred repartee with her subjects that will keep viewers tuned in.


Has no one told the Canadians that she is not now nor has she ever been a doctor, as Real Doctor Ben Goldacre explains. Even if she did not write the text, she has not corrected the error.



Judging by the trailer and various press interviews, the show is a mixture of common sense about healthy diet and exercise, mixed with her trademark haranguing and some random science words. She says that healthy food will help with sexiness because 'The B vitamins in green leafy veg should help hormones needed for good sex'.


I'm not a scientist (and nor is she) so I consulted someone who is - Alastair Duncan, the Principle Dietician at Guys and St Thomas' Hospital in London. He described this statement as 'tenuous' and said: "Zinc and the B vitamins are important for the metabolism but unless someone was B vitamin deficient, they wouldn't need extra. Deficiency to the level that would negatively impact on the hormones needed for sexual function is very rare. Eating green vegetables would not boost sexual function".


And that's just in the trailer. Not-Doctor Gillian also advises eating a lot of seeds of various kinds - and it just so happens that she sells a seed mix. There is no book to accompany the series yet but it can only be a matter of time.


It doesn't take a scientist to see that she is playing on women's fears about their bodies and their desirability. The trailer shows her grabbing a handful of a woman's belly and wobbling the fat vigorously while the woman looks miserable and humiliated. Self-loathing makes great TV.


This is the casting call that was put out to find participants:

Would you like to lose weight, eat better and feel sexier and have your own nutritionist and personal trainer for Free!!

W network is making a new TV series with renowned nutritionist Gillian Mckeith from TV shows "You are what you eat" and "Super size Vs super skinny." She is here to help You!

Do any of these Statement describe you?

-Are you more than 30lbs or more overweight?

-Do you have bad eating habits and an unhealthy diet?

-Are you in a relationship?

-Do you feel unattractive and undesirable to your partner?

-Have you tried every diet under the sun only to end up back at square one?

-Would you feel comfortable discussing these issues on TV?

If you answered yes to each question and you want to get healthy, lose weight and feel sexier,get in touch with me and tell me your story.

Single women need not apply, by the look of it. In fact, the ad doesn't mention women but it is clearly targeted at them. How often do men talk about the need to feel sexier?


Even though Not-Doctor McKeith claims the show is about making women feel better about themselves rather than making them skinny, it is clear that fat = unsexy. Not only should women feel bad about being overweight, they should worry that they are inadequate as women too, that their partners will find them undesirable and maybe even leave them.


She does a 'sexual health profile' on each woman, telling them how sexy they should be for their age and how sexy they currently are - which is of course not nearly sexy enough. To do this, there is a sexy-o-meter but it's not clear on what scientific principles it is constructed. There is also the 'head-turn' test to see how many men turn to look at the woman before and after she has been McKeithed. All randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, replicable methodology with a sufficiently large sample, then. She is a doctor, after all. Oh wait, no she isn't.







And yet. No one forced these women to be on TV. These are willing victims, accomplices of the Not-Doctor. Whether it is the lure of micro-celebrity or desperation that causes them to expose themselves to the nation, I don't know. It's the women watching who are most vulnerable to the fat= unsexy message, the ones who do not have Domme McKeith to transform their lives from lumpy frump to sex kitten. No matter how many products she markets and how many books she writes, these women will have their negative self-image and insecurities re-inforced. The men, meanwhile, can continue to be as lardy as they like


Maybe the show will encourage some to change but not for the right reasons, not just to be more healthy. They will change to be more desirable to others (men), because they have been emotionally blackmailed to care more about what others (men) think of them than about being healthy and content in themselves. Their complex psychological relationship with food will not be reshaped in a more healthy way, making relapse more likely.


If they are not feeling 'sexy' because of physical or psychological factors, or because the marriage is in serious trouble, then changing their diet and waistline is not going to fix anything.


It would be entertaining if, at the end of the show, the sexied-up woman was told that she could now do so much better than her judgmental slob of a husband and was given the number of a good divorce lawyer.


Good luck, Canada.

UPDATE 10.3.10

The show has arrived in the UK. Not the high-profile slot on Channel 4 she once had but 10pm on the Discovery Channel on Mondays. Lucky us.