How much money has Food for the Brain taken from our schools?

See also an update re. Chineham’s response to my FOIA request.

I’ve been using the Freedom of Information act to make some inquiries re. Food For The Brain’s (FFTB) ‘trials’ in Chineham Park and Cricket Green schools. I’m still waiting on some responses – sadly, Holford didn’t give me much notice of the date of broadcast of his Tonight show documentary – but I think it’s worth sharing what I’ve got before this show is broadcast.

Firstly, FFTB reportedly asked for a donation from Cricket Green school in order to conduct its ‘trial’ on Cricket Green children. At Cricket Green’s request, Merton Council therefore donated “£1,000 towards a specific piece of research commissioned by and carried out at Cricket Green School…The research was to assess the relationship between food, concentration and behaviour.”

Strangely, Merton Council has told me that they have no documents relating to FFTB’s intervention in Cricket Green: it seems odd that they donated a far-from-trivial sum, but have not even got a written report re. how this money was spent on file. Neither Merton nor Cricket Green has a draft of the FFTB report on this ‘trial’, or of the data resulting from it: again, given that Merton helped fund the research and Cricket Green gave FFTB access to the children at the school, this seems somewhat strange.

There will be a number of posts on Holford Watch over the next week – and readers can judge for themselves whether this ‘science’ was a good investment of scarce public funds. However, even if the ‘science’ was sound – what I’ve seen makes me very doubtful that it was – I don’t believe that Merton Council should have had to fund this ‘research’.

Patrick Holford is the CEO of FFTB. He has also made a lot of money from his commercial interests in nutritional supplements: hundreds of thousands of pounds, at least. The FFTB ‘trial’ looks likely to give the nutritional supplements industry a lot of valuable publicity: a half hour of prime time TV on ITV would have most companies drooling. The FFTB website helps publicise such certain brands of pills: it names the brands of some of the supplements given to the kids participating (and quotes one kid saying that “I like taking vitamins”). It is also, by and large, quite hard to gain access to a group of children to use in a trial (even a bona fide scientific trial) and this makes it all the more surprising that FFTB appears to have received donations from Merton in order for FFTB to use these kids in its ‘trial’.

For all these reasons, it seems quite odd that FFTB reportedly solicited a donation from Cricket Green – especially given how under-resourced English special needs education is. While £1,000 might not sound like all that much, a correspondent e-mailed me to point out that this would have been enough to pay for a dietician to provide their services for two weeks/70 hours: something that would, I expect, have played a much more useful role in allowing Cricket Green to develop evidence-based (and safe) dietary interventions.

This £1,000 donation from Merton Council therefore leaves a bad taste in my mouth. To be blunt, wasn’t Cricket Green providing a group of kids to participate in the ‘trial’ enough of a contribution? And couldn’t one of the supplement companies getting good publicity from these ‘trials’ – or Holford himself – have simply written a £1k cheque themselves?