mckeith.jpg“McKeith’s stock in trade is abuse, on a scale that would have any doctor struck off: making people cry for the television cameras, I assume deliberately, and using fear and bullying to get them to change their lifestyles. As a posture it is seductive, it has a sense of generating movement, but if you drag yourself away from the theatricality of souped-up recipe and lifestyle shows on telly, the evidence shows that scare campaigns tend not to get people changing their behaviour in the long term.

Trying to decide which paragraph to pull out from this extraordinarily brilliant bad science piece from today’s Guardian was tricky. It begins as a systematic debunking of the recently demoted ‘Doctor’ Gillian McKeith, before seguing into a deeper and more complex discussion of how these programmes miss the real point/ complexity of the issues.

It’s a brilliant mixture of fact, opinion and wisdom and you must read it now.