Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

Looking into the ION ‘foundation science degree’, I was reading through their info brochure. The first thing that hit me were the adverts - not what you’d usually expect in an academic brochure. For example, on the front of the brochure there’s a big, colourful ad for Revital - whose website currently is currently advertising a training event in Psychic Surgery and Spiritual Healing. Well, it’s important that science students learn these skills, I think. And, if they can demonstrate them in controlled conditions, there’s an easy million dollars available to them - bye bye student loan! Admittedly, all who’ve tried this under controlled conditions have failed - but a trained ION scientist could always be the first!

Anyway, struggling to look past the (very bright) ads in the brochure, it’s worth looking at the actual text. David Nicolson (ION Executive Director) notes that studying nutrition is topical because “[m]emories of…foot and mouth
are still fresh in most of our minds” (p. 3). I’m not entirely sure of the relevance of foot and mouth for human nutrition: this infects animals with cloven hooves (and a couple of other species - hedgehogs and elephants, for example). So, unless a nutritionist’s client has cloven hooves, or is an elephant (I’ll omit the obvious fat joke here), foot and mouth disease probably isn’t a major concern*.

Of course, when choosing where to study the history of the institution is important. The info brochure claims that “[t]he Institute was founded in 1984 by Patrick Holford [who developed an] innovative application of principles that are now universally recognised as the benchmark for Optimum Nutrition.” (p. 4) Universality is an easy thing to falsify - I don’t recognise Holford’s principles as the benchmark for ‘optimum nutrition’, so they’re not universally recognised. Of course, there’s no particular reason to take notice of what I say - so one should also look at whether more prominent people have challenged Holford. They have - for example, the prominent dietician Catherine Collins has been critical of Holford’s ‘principles’.

So, that’s one false claim of universal recognition in the brochure, one unusual advert, and one somewhat dubious reference to Foot and Mouth disease - and we’re only on p4 (of 25!) The problem with ION and Holford producing so much problematic material is that there’s no way one blog can get through it all! I’m only at p4 of the ION course brochure, and I’ve already spent too long on it - I need to get on with some work, and will get through more of the brochure another day.

*Foot and Mouth disease can, rarely, be caught by humans - but this is through contact with infected animals, so will not be a nutritional problem (except, perhaps, for those who raise their own meat). Even in these cases, humans rarely catch this disease - between 1921 and 69 there were about 40 confirmed cases in the world.