Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

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 GMTV

If 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.