I think that it is desperately dangerous that people like Patrick [Holford] with no medical qualifications at all are telling people like Kyra that they have cured their diabetes.
[Dr. Sarah Jarvis, appearing with Patrick Holford on GMTV, June 13, to discuss diabetes management. Partial transcript and commentary available.]
Patrick Holford is not modest about his claims for diabetes management: he even claims that he knows how to reverse diabetes type 2. It’s Diabetes Week in the UK and Patrick Holford obviously had high hopes for promoting his diabetes management programme and the Holford Low-GL Diet on today’s segment on LK Today. His web page promised:
Can you reverse diabetes with diet?
As featured on GMTV
Diabetes currently effects 2 million people in the UK and is a growing concern.
Patrick Holford will be discussing important and highly effective alternative nutrition approaches to prevent and reverse this life threatening condition. [Please take the [sic] as read for the errors.]
Less “as featured” and more “as subjected to some light scrutiny that it did not withstand even for a few minutes once Dr. Jarvis was free to express herself”.
It is noteworthy that the Holford websites had modified their front pages in anticipation of the programme, e.g., Patrick Holford:
Featured on GMTVIf you watched Patrick on GMTV this morning and would like to find out more about his recommendations to combat diabetes go to www.patrickholford.com/diabetes
Holford’s Health Products for Life site carried new promotions for his New! GL Support and New! Cinnachrome. For reasons that I can’t fathom, Holford was allowed to display several bottles of supplements on the table and they were in view for some of the time, and at least one was clearly identifiable as his own formulation that is newly promoted, as above.
Of course, by the time that Dr. Sarah Jarvis, co-author of Diabetes for Dummies: UK Edition, presented her robust opinion of Holford’s supplements, you may or may not be eager to find out more about Holford’s recommendations to combat diabetes.
Dr. Jarvis emphasised that a mediterranean-style diet is endlessly recommended by people involved in diabetes management. Jarvis expressed herself with some verve:
It’s basically commonsense. All apart from the supplements which I’m afraid are complete nonsense. The diet is something we’ve known about for decades.
There will be more detail about the supplements in subsequent posts. It was heartening to see supplements and their purported benefits being treated so robusly on UK television; it is too rare a sight. It is the more important that this should be done for such a common, chronic condition like diabetes type 2
Holford tried to imply that Jarvis and other diabetes health professionals were ignoring the value of supplements and proferred a paper with an overview of chromium studies (sadly, he didn’t identify it further). But we at Holford Watch are not deterred by details such as that, we shall locate and assess this paper.
All in all, Patrick Holford v. Dr. Sarah Jarvis in the Arena of Diabetes Management looked like a knockout win for Jarvis and a small victory for commonsense. Given some of Holford’s fauxrious articles and emails after previous events, e.g., Watchdog, it will be interesting to watch his response to this item.
12 Comments
June 24, 2007 at 8:57 am
He states that most people don’t get enough chromium in their diets.
Well the answer is in the question!
Onions and tomatoes are high in chromium, eat more of them, why buy an expensive supplement.
The really annoying thing (and you see this all the time) people make a statement (sometime accurate, sometimes not) and then state their solution is the answer and you need to buy xyz, when there is a simpler cheaper answer. We are programmed by programs like GMTV to not see it.
June 25, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Hi Kate – if you don’t buy his supplement, he will be very sad. As he has said before, he is not a grocer…
Generally Motivated by Truthiness and Vanity – that’s GMTV.
August 1, 2007 at 2:23 pm
he is was on lbc radio talking about diabetes and other cures! how do we get him off?
August 2, 2007 at 1:51 am
Phone or write to the producers of the radio segment? Mention us and our objections to his stuff? Mention that he was verbally trounced by Dr Sarah Jarvis who had some trenchant and accurate comments to make about his advice?
Do you remember the name of the programme/timeslot by any chance, please?
April 3, 2008 at 1:21 am
[...] Patrick Holford v. Dr. Sarah Jarvis in the Arena of Diabetes Management Patrick Holford v. Dr. Sarah Jarvis in the Arena of Diabetes Management Part 2 [...]
July 26, 2008 at 5:38 pm
[...] story in which Holford and Jarvis discuss diabetes management; read some discussion and analysis, Part 1 and Part2. Plus, the full story of the lack of an appropriate evidence-base to support [...]
January 31, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Are you guys objecting to someone you see as unqualified reversing diabetes through nutrition alone on national TV? Is this professional jealousy? I have relatives subsisting on pharmaceuticals because they believe and listen to people like you as authority figures. Why doesn’t their doctor get them on a low GL diet? You are nothing but reps for the pharmaceutical industry, which, in case you didn’t know, is the biggest and most powerful in the in the world and probably the sponsor of this website?
Admin edit: Ah – the pharma shill gambit eh? Clumsily deployed. And, you haven’t read very far if you haven’t noticed that this blog isn’t sponsored.
I note that you haven’t responded to the ‘reversal – persistence of damage point’ so perhaps you have managed to grasp that concept. You have also, clearly, failed to read the misinformation about GL that is promulgated by Holford, students of his institute, and his co-author of books about the GL system. E.g., his GL co-author Fiona McDonald Joyce believes that chicken breast is fattier than chicken leg or thigh and that it is a higher GL. How does nonsense like that help anyone?
We have laid out our objections to Holford disseminating misinformation and disinformation at some length – read further. You may not wish to learn about the mistakes but you will be better informed.
February 3, 2009 at 2:33 am
I’ve now responded to the ‘reversal – persistence of damage point.’ I hope you check it out.
Yeah, the ‘pharma shill’ thing. In truth I can’t decide if the nutrition-knocking agenda always stems from big pharma or whether it’s professional jealousy, or ultra conservatism, or a reluctance to accept the horrible truth that mankind evolved over millions of years to exist in an environment that he no longer lives in, ingesting molecular information (food) that his highly intricate metabolism is not evolved to process. Maybe you are religious types? I dunno… Maybe it’s all just too new and scary? The medical establishment has a long history of course of being slow to accept change.
I’m just a layperson as you may guess, I came across the site looking for the rest of that video on diabetes (from GMTV.) I confess I haven’t read much of this site but taking the chicken thing as an example, I am aware from Dr Paul Clayton that the white meat from the top side of a chicken is white because the flight muscles aren’t exercised, unlike the bottom side where the meat is darker. The white meat has less blood supply, less haemoglobin, fewer mitochondria and is insulin resistant, whereas the dark meat is physically functional and insulin sensitive. Maybe this would be relevant in following a strict low glycemic load diet to control diabetes? Of course you probably attack Dr Paul Clayton also? Although it’s clear from the video on your site that Dr Jarvis finds reversing diabetes with a low GL diet to be ‘common sense’ and acknowledges that former diabetics following a low GL diet can COME OFF THEIR MEDICATION. Do you deny this despite her words? Is it just the supplements that you object to?
Tell me, do you acknowledge that heart disease can be reversed by diet and lifestyle changes? Do you deny the work of Dean Ornish or Caldwell Esselstyn for instance?
Admin edit: it would be polite of you to read the blog rather than continue to make the egregious assumptions than underpin your comments. You are now having to contort food analysis and science to somehow make Holford and his co-author correct about the relative fat content and GI of chicken parts and you’re happy about that?
Do you deny that standard advice for several decades for diabetes and heart disease has included some element of diet advice and guidance on exercise – whether people have followed it or not?
Interesting that you regard correcting errors as an attack though…
February 3, 2009 at 1:58 pm
You regard that as contortion? Did I not merely relay some information I had that had direct relevance to the issue you drew my attention to?
Indeed there have been dietary ‘recommendations’ which I believe have had low compliance due to the lack of understanding of the HUGE role that diet & lifestyle play not only in treating, but in reversing and CAUSING diabetes.
Erm… if this site doesn’t represent an ‘attack’ then my oxford dictionary has been in error all these years.
What IS interesting is that you did not answer any of my questions… mmm…
Admin edit: your dictionary is probably fine, it’s in the interpretation that you err (I doubt that is the first time you have heard that).
As for the ‘questions’, we’ll repeat the advice very slowly, read the blog – you will learn much. Your material has already had more attention that its intrinsic merit would warrant.
By the by – you might look up the process whereby a GI of a foodstuff is measured – it will obviously be an eye-opener for you and stop you from making at least some of your egregious errors.
February 3, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Gregg seems to be taking a break from his usual faux-naif “I’m only asking” pro-chelation anti-vax stuff. Odd how he never exercise the glimmers of critical thinking he affects to have when rhapsodising about biological dentistry or other woo that he had been researching for a whole month, back in November.
Watching this exchange is like an excerpt from I’m Alan Partridge.
————-
Scene, the interview between Alan Partridge and Peter Baxendale-Thomas (of the Norfolk Farmers Union) on Radio Norwich.
Alan: I’ll tell you what. You farmers, you don’t like outsiders, do you? You like to stick to your own.
Peter: What do you mean by that?
Alan: I’ve seen the big-eared boys on farms.
Peter: Oh, for goodness’ sake.
Alan: If you see a lovely field with a family having a picnic, and there’s a nice pond in it, you fill in the pond with concrete, you plough the family into the field, you blow up the tree, and use the leaves to make a dress for your wife who’s also your brother.
Peter: Look, have I got anything else to say here or shall I go?
Alan: Well, listen, I’ll tell you what the point is. You have big sheds, but nobody’s allowed in, and inside these big sheds are twenty-foot high chickens. Because of all the chemicals you put in them.
Alan: And these chickens are scared. They don’t know why they’re so big. They go “oh why am I so massive?” And they’re looking down on all the other little chickens, and they think they’re in an aeroplane because all the other chickens are so small… do you deny that? No. His silence, I think, speaks volumes.
————-
February 4, 2009 at 1:06 am
We’ve given you a great deal of lee way – moved to off-topic.
February 4, 2009 at 9:34 am
Admin edit: off-topic for this post – moved.
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