Answering The Nutrition Critics - Patrick Holford

When you tread a path that's not yet mainstream, people will often criticise you for it. This year has kicked off with a flurry of attacks on 'media nutritionists', vitamin C and HIV, food intolerance testing, supplements for children, and also the Food for the Brain schools campaign. We must be ruffling some conservative feathers to attract so much attention! For those of us who are committed to pursuing better health naturally and harmlessly, sometimes it's necessary to answer our critics and correct the misinformation they quote.
As a result, I'd like to share my responses to several recent assaults in the press. I appreciate there's a lot of information to wade through here, but as these different cases have a similar theme, I thought I'd deal with them all together. So let's start with my response to material written by a journalist called Dr Ben Goldacre.

Today, the Guardian published my reply to Goldacre's claims:
"In Goldacre's column on 6 January 2007, he once again accuses me of 'bad science' in reference to a statement in one of my books that 'AZT is potentially harmful and proving less effective than vitamin C'. As he well knows, the author of the research - Dr Raxit Jariwalla - wrote to the Guardian (20/1/05) the last time Goldacre made this claim to confirm that my statement is correct on the basis of two studies on HIV infected cells. The real crime here is that no full scale human trials have been funded on vitamin C to follow up Jariwalla's important finding because it is non-patentable and hence not profitable. Goldacre seems unconcerned about the way commercial interests distort scientific research."

To read my full reply - and to find out what Dr Raxit Jariwalla, the leading immunologist on vitamin C and HIV, has to say - click here

Tirade against 'media nutritionists'
Last week, Goldacre continued his tirade against 'media nutritionists' in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), scoffing at the all these makeover programmes, claiming false information is being dispensed.

Here are some extracts from my reply in the BMJ:
"The estimated cost of diet-related diseases to the NHS is in excess of �15 billion, according to the Royal Society [1]. Obesity has become the second most common cause of premature death, with smoking being the first. Type 2 diabetes, a preventable and largely reversible diet-related disease, is predicted to affect approximately one in twenty [2], and possibly one in six people over age 40 by 2010. Prostate cancer, according to the East Anglia Cancer Surveillance Unit at Cambridge University [3], is predicted to effect 23% of men by 2015 - representing an 83% increase in thirty years - strongly linked in epidemiological studies to high dairy consumption [4]. Clearly, many people in Britain continue to dig their own graves with a knife and fork. The fundamental political issue is how to radically and swiftly change the diet culture in Britain.

There is reason to believe that the media will play a major role in encouraging such a culture shift, and that health messages need to be entertaining to achieve impact. Media nutritionists who demonstrate that transformation, weight loss and disease reversal is possible by diet and lifestyle modification should be actively encouraged, not attacked, as Ben Goldacre, a doctor with no apparent speciality in nutrition or research expertise, has done in his article 'Tell us the truth about nutritionists'.

In his article, which contains not one single reference to substantiate his claims, he attacks advice to eat turmeric for cancer protection, including that of the prostate. Some 1834 studies are cited in PubMed on turmeric or curcumin, thought to be the active ingredient in this spice, many of which demonstrate clear anti-inflammatory and immune enhancing properties, 648 of which relate specifically, and consistently, to it's anti-cancer properties."

"Goldacre's plea to know the truth about nutritionists pales into insignificance in relation for our need to know the truth about nutrition and, most imperatively, to channel more public money into researching foods such as turmeric which, unlike patentable drugs, have no significant commercial return, and hence cannot attract commercial private sector funding. In researching nutritional approaches to common diseases in my book 'Food is better Medicines Than Drugs' (www.foodismedicine.co.uk) I cite several hundred studies, many of which are randomised control trials. Many doctors, such as Goldacre, are simply unaware how much good quality evidence does exist for nutrition approaches and consequently underestimate the power of optimum nutrition in disease prevention and reversal. As George Bernard Shaw aptly said 'Those of you who say it can't be done should not interrupt those of us who are doing it'."
Patrick Holford - media nutritionist and founder of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition

Medical journalist Jerome Burne's letter in the BMJ also made the following points:
"It's striking that in damning the 'media nutritionists' actions, he [Goldacre] fails to ask the two most basic questions about any form of treatment - does it work and is it safe? There are certainly hundreds of thousands of people who would tell him that following dietary changes recommended in books or TV programmes has benefited them enormously. Not a randomised trial, of course, but surely worth considering. Furthermore, even their sternest critics have failed to make a serious case that 'media nutritionists' kill or maim people. Unlike prescription drugs which, puzzlingly, are never the target of Goldacres's tirades.

This is especially puzzling because the essence of his assault on all non-drug medicine is that it is unscientific. Look at the charges he levels at media nutritionists - they: 'wear a cloak of scientific authority', 'make up evidence when it is missing', 'cherry pick the literature', 'only quote favourable studies'.

Is he really unable to see that every one of these is regularly done on a far larger scale and with far more damaging effects by the pharmaceutical companies? The concealing of evidence of problems with SSRIs, the marketing and distorting of evidence over Vioxx, the failure to issue warnings over anti-psychotic drugs - to mention just three - not only did harm to innumerable patients but also seriously and deeply tarnished and undermined the meaningful research work of genuine academics."

You can read these letters in full by clicking here

Children's health in question
Meanwhile, the Food for the Brain schools project has been coming in for some flak too. An article in the Independent on Sunday on 7 January quotes Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London, expressing concerns about the health of a particular child involved in the project.

What's strange about this is the child's mother is absolutely delighted with her daughter's transformation and believes she's made considerable progress. However, as Ms Collins is not the girl's dietician and, as far as we know, has never met her, it's no wonder she's not aware of the full story. Click here to read my reply, submitted�to the Independent. And click here to hear me answer Ms Collins's objections to IgG food allergy testing.

The results of this first Food for the Brain school project are impressive with many children with autism, ADHD and even genetic conditions and cerebral palsy showing major improvement. If you'd like to see these results for yourself, go to www.foodforthebrain.org and look under 'reports'.

Of course, you'd think that everyone would be delighted to hear that children with special educational needs have improved dramatically, but some critics seem more concerned to point out that it wasn't a double-blind placebo controlled trial so you don't know what did what. Was it the diet, the supplements or the exercise?

When science isn't science
The general thrust of these kind of medical and dietetic critics is that there isn't scientific evidence for, for example, giving vitamins to children. They often imply that the only real science is 'randomised placebo-controlled trials' often called RCTs.

Yet, in the case of multivitamins and children's IQ, there have been 13, of which ten have shown significant improvement. The rebuttal is 'children don't need supplements, they just need better diet'. Unfortunately, there just isn't any RCT evidence that dietary changes alone produce these kind of results. So, if you really wanted to be a stickler for the science, you wouldn't change the diet!

The same point is illustrated by Goldacre's concerns about vitamin C and HIV, or turmeric and cancer. There aren't any RCTs proving their effect. And it's true, there aren't. But all the available evidence (epidemiological - meaning studies of associations; animal studies; cell or 'in vitro' studies) all show good evidence of benefit.

The reason that some spokespeople ignore and want suppression of anything other than RCTs (at least on nutritional issues) may be simply because RCTs cost so much money, and favour pill trials (very hard to do placebo trials on diet or exercise), that almost all are funded by the drug industry, thus perpetuating the unhealthy monopoly within medicine today.

But, of course, even when the RCTs do exist - as for multivitamins and children - somehow the evidence is ignored. The real hypocrisy is that newspapers are full of stories about drugs that can cure diseases 'coming next year', not based on RCTs.

Weirdness on Wikipedia
Ideally, debates on issues of scientific and medical contention should stick to the facts, but unfortunately those in the front line of paradigm shifts are usually subject to personal attacks, of which I've had many. I noticed a few on Wikipedia, which is meant to be the 'people's encyclopedia' meaning that anyone can edit an entry. Unfortunately, some of the people who have been editing appear to be part of the pro-drug lobby. I did write to the moderator to straighten out some facts, but have had no reply, so I've decided to stay out of it. Of course, if you think there's anything said that is wrong, or anything you'd like to add, feel free to do so.

In summary.
Somebody once told me that 'expecting people to treat you well just because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge just because you are a vegetarian'. I guess Jerome Burne's and my book Food is Better Medicine Than Drugs - not one single fact in which has yet been disputed - is a red rag to the pro-drug bull. Ridicule and attack are to be expected in the dying throes of the old pharmaceutical model of treating disease, as it inevitably makes way for a more holistic approach with optimum nutrition at its core.

Wishing you the best of health,

 

References:
1. S. Fairweather-Tate, 'Human nutrition and food research: opportunities and challenges in the post-genomic era', Royal Society, 9 September 2003, published on-line.
2. YHPHO, 'PBS Diabetes Population Prevalence Model - Phase 2 June 2005, available on line at www.yhpho.org.uk.
3. East Anglia Cancer Surveillance Unit, Cambridge University.
4. D Ganmaa et al, 'Incidence and mortality of testicular and prostatic cancers in relation to world dietary practices', International Journal of Cancer, 2002, 98 (2): pp 262-267.