“Researchers at the Karolinska Institute, University of Eastern Finland and the Finnish Institute of Public Health reports that increased hal-ter of holotranskobalamin, the active part of vitamin B12, greatly reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease among the elderly.

-Even small improvements in the B12 status resulted in our study, a significantly reduced risk, “said Miia Kivipelto, an associate professor at the Karolinska Institute.

She is now calling for more research to confirm the findings and provide advice on how B12 can be used in prevention and treatment.

The researchers studied 271 elderly persons living in eastern Finland. They were at baseline in 1998 aged 65-79 years without symptoms, and were followed until 2006.”

The point is that it is easy to sit on the internet and slag off people like Patrick Holford, but generally speaking people like him are helping drive society in the right direction – which is eating healthier is good for you; and understanding that when you eat something it might have a specific impact inside you – duh!

Guess what; chemistry is complicated and other reactions can happen which is why when you treat a problem with chemical A you might get a side effect which negates the positive benefit of the first level of treatment.

My point here is that these guys are driving in the right direction; and many health solutions can be found in simple food products (which won’t net the pharmaceutical industry billions so they won’t research or promote it, will they).

Those professors who he says review what he writes – do they give it to their cats and if the cat heaves up a hairball then it’s all OK?

Admin edit: well, it’s no wackier a suggestion than Patrick Holford selling dowsing kits to diagnose vitamin and mineral deficiencies so it could well be a popular method…

He has been described to me several times as “a character”.

Dr Aust, does any other nation use this description in such a charming and complimentary way?

I’m currently looking in more detail at the idea of space race supplementation as an intellectual trigger for food and vitamin pills. Sadly, some of the science in the Holford output seems rather worse than that in various Andersen oeuvres.

Anyway, he has a long-standing interest in nutritional effects, and I guess we can all agree that we would want research into such areas to be done by proper researchers (which he is) in proper Universities (ditto).

Like you, I guess, I would only worry that David Smith will get his fingers burned with Patrick, see the kind of messages about supplementation now emerging from Holford Central. PH does quite a good job of seeming “scientific” to the unwary (this is, after all, PH’s core appeal), and perhaps even to the scientifically informed unwary. It is only once people begin to really subject PH’s stuff to a bit of “forensic” analysis that it becomes clear that PH is just another Woo-meister but with science-y go-faster stripes for camouflage. For which revealing we have to thank Holfordwatch and Ben Goldacre, inter alia

Prof Smith has collaborated for some time with Prof Holford; they teach the Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs seminar together in various places and for particular groups.

I will be interested in the outcome of the OPTIMA trials. Until they are published, however, it seems premature to recommend supplementation. Particularly as it seems as if current knowledge indicates that it is not advisable to supplement some vitamins or minerals to people who have had cardiac incidents; the demographic for people to develop cardiac problems and (say) Alzheimer’s is remakably similar.

I would guess the partial explanation is that David Smith, who clearly does have a long-standing interest in nutritional effects on memory and ageing, is a “mad enthusiast” type Professor – plenty of them about. Thus anyone seemingly sharing the enthusiasm might get a hearing.

Hopefully Smith has the smarts to see through a charlatan masquerading as another enthusiast.