A number of our threads have discussion that is off-topic to the post: this is inconvenient to anyone who is interested in researching an issue. So, we shall move off-topic comments to here.
Most commenters know this by default but for the handful who don’t, we will moderate comments that contain abuse or obscenities.
We may move towards moderating comments that ask questions that have been asked and answered on previous occasions.
If you don’t think that logic is a good method for determining what to believe, make an attempt to convince me of that without using logic. No one has even bothered to try yet. [Brett Lemoine]
Similarly, when you have been given appropriate information or links to read and you do not read them but continue to make your original statements in the hope that the broken record technique will wear down everyone’s critical faculties, this may lead to moderation if disemvowelling hasn’t worked.
For the majority of our commenters who are lively, well-mannered and whose comments regularly add to the general knowledge store, thank you.
Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief. It is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and full of invention.
Updated July 6, 2008.
Ella- glad to hear that you have a relevant degree and know how research should be conducted. Perhaps you could use those skills to go through the references you’ve posted to find some which are particularly relevant to our current understanding of vaccinations and autism, and are of good quality.
If you want an example of the problems with the studies you list, we’ve already looked at the Yazbak study you link. In this study,
I’m sure you can see why this methodology would – to put it politely – be problematic.
I’m very sorry if your sister had an adverse reaction to a vaccine. We haven’t claimed that vaccines never cause adverse reactions – clearly, they do so on occasion. However, this does not detract from the fact that vaccines can bring significant benefits; it also does not mean that bad research on vaccines (Holford, Yazbak, Wakefield and others) is somehow justified.
review of the book ” do vaccines cause that”:
This book was published by Immunizations for Public Health, which is sponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). That’s fine if you’re okay with standard medical propaganda. The intent of this book is NOT to provide an honest assessment of vaccine risks, but rather to assuage parental anxiety and convince you that vaccination is safe and effective. If that’s all you want, then you can save your money and simply visit any pro-vaccine website and follow their recommendations. Other books are available that will provide honest, unbiased data to help you make informed decisions. For example, the Vaccine Safety Manual summarizes vaccine studies from around the world. The Vaccine Guide is commendable as well.
Admin edit: that’s not a review of the book or its content. The book is written in accessible language and summarises the current state of the art of vaccination evidence. Not everybody has the time or appropriate resources to look through The Pink Book.
It’s disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that you are, apparently, unable to appreciate the difference in quality between the books that you mention and Do Vaccines Do That?
why is it not suprising? thats not my review btw
Between this and Holford’s vaccine claims you are discussing – the upcoming conference should be about ION and Patrick Holford’s disservice to mankind not service.
I hope that more people find out just what they are buying into when they recommend his book to their friends and family. Friend and family who may well not be enjoying the health that they do if they had listened to the antivax stupidity of Holford and pals.
Are you going to nominate Patrick Holford for BSer of the year?
“Bullshitter of the Year
This is an open category, so you can nominate a politician, a journalist/commentator, editor or other public figure, but what we’re
looking for in this category is either a single but overwhelmingly spectacular example of bullshitting or a consistent portfolio of bullshit over a period of months.”
Admin edit: it’s a tempting prospect. Particularly the portfolio – hm.
I saw the idea somewhere that you really need to start putting pressure on Patrick Holford’s publisher – something to do with the new Trading Standards guidance that means you can’t promote somethign w/out evidence. I assume that means you can’t make the evidence up or revere the authors’ conclusions w/out very good reasons.
Patrick Holford would make an excellent candidate for BSer of the year.
Some of the many things he is wrong about but refuses to correct:
chromium and cinnamon for diabetes;
his fabulous GL diet that he seems to think was researched and created by his good self;
vaccination;
antioxidant mega-doses (who can forget that pathetic offering of an anecdote of 2 people v. that review with nearly a quarter of a million people);
statistics (your takedown of the FFTB report is a fond memory that I use in stats classes);
the nutritional content of some foods;
vitamin C for HIV.
Too many. So much misinformation emanating from one man whom so many take at his own valuation as someone said above.
Stop these people taking up so much space in our mainstream media and handing out bogus advice.
Eat your veg – fine – but it’s what everyone’s grandmother and mother has been saying since year dot.
I agree with whoever said that we are all so worried about our jobs and families and how we are going to stay healthy that we don’t need more ‘expertise’ from the likes of Holford and co.
I had no idea that neither he nor Gillian McKeith had a qualification in nutrition. I thought that they were both proper doctors. That’s the way that they are presented.
You attract a lot of anger for just trying to do the right thing.
It is essential that someone is documenting why all this stuff is wrong. After all, all these people borrow from each other so the same myths get propagated. What you write here is useful for seeing why so many other people who claim the same things are wrong. It seems the more they claim to be grounded in science the more you can bet that they read the abstract rather than the paper and probably have no chance of understanding the paper.
Good job to you all.
Admin edit: thanks.
My wife was going to go to one of these very expensive courses that he runs. She said that it would be like a cheaper form of health insurance. But I read what you calculated about the estimated cost of his recommended supplements a day. It would be more than £20 a day for everyone in the household – that’s just the basic package! I’d rather spend it on better food or even a personal trainer for the family.
You saved us a lot of money.
Admin edit: happy to be of service :-) Of course, saving that money would pay for a winter holiday in the sunshine (get your vitamin D and a nice break) or a good walking holiday (breathtaking scenes of natural beauty and CV exercise. Plus mintcake – maybe that’s my vice).
£140 a week is like a generous food bill for most families. You could even buy organic, raised with love chickens and pigs for that money.
Anyone who pays that sort of money is asking to be deceived.
Admin edit: Don’t entirely agree. Agree on the food – but if people are persuaded to part with money because they believe the person is an expert and is being presented to them as an expert, then the responsibility for that may be more diffuse.
This is an area where the different remits of Trading Standards and ASA is very annoying and very limiting.
To Admin,
If Holford is really a public enemy then why not attack him? Is it not a little limp to merely ‘perform a critical assessment’ of his ‘work?’ If he’s fleecing people then attack him! If untreated, unhealed, and unburdened-of-cash patients leave his clinic in droves then, for their sake, attack him!
Oh, and I’d really like to hear your critical assessment of the work of Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn which you have, rather obtrusively, side stepped.
Admin edit: moved.
Yet again, we refer you to the comments policy.
Your attack fantasies are your own business, don’t bring them to us. However, if they are troubling then you may wish to talk to a friend about them or a trusted figure such as your family doctor.
We will not do your class assignments for you, you will have to read and think at some point.
This is a blog about Patrick Holford and his brand of nutritionism – not other people whom your affect to admire.
Make your other comments at least on-topic for this blog. Read the comments policy.
Well Gregg, I could not of put it better myself.
It is so obvious that our genitic expression is in large dictated by the molecules in our food, with which we have evolved with. The people writing on this blog have become so detatched from this concept. They are the ones that have become trusting of econmonic science as I would call it, not yourself.
Instead of using their innate understanding of what we are and how we function within our environment they will wait until science gives them the answer. Unfortunately they will be waiting a long long time and all the while will support the easy option of symptom management with drugs that that send people spiralling even further away from what our cells have evolved to expect. I feel so sorry for these poeple. All this work to support a health system that is riddled with lies. Nice one guys
Admin edit: moved
Make your other comments at least on-topic for this blog. Read the comments policy.
It is common knowledge that the mainstream medical industry are failing whenit comes to cardiovascular disease. When are they going to stop prescribing drugs that dont work and face up to the fact that inflammation is the key. When are the public going to hear the truth.
Attacking holford is one thing but could you stop attacking anyone with a differrent opinion to yourselves. I have read many a response to bloggers and I can almost hear you sniggering behind your arrogance. This is not pleasent
Admin edit: you haven’t read our comments policy yet you affect to lecture others on pleasant behaviour. Ditto, you make egregious errors about the content of this blog and make no attempt to read it because you might discover that you are wrong. What was that about ‘pleasantness’?
Judging by the inability to even wish to read critical analysis and consult primary sources to discover that Patrick Holford is mis-using those sources, you criticise those who point out that he is in error.
If you are hearing sniggering etc. – again, we suggest a cup of tea with a trusted friend.
You know you guys seem so antiquated considering that the massive role nutrition and lifestyle play in ill health is being revealed year on year, showing that the ‘wacky-private-nutrition-clinic[s]’ as you so naively term them were right all along. In the US it has already broken into the mainstream through the 30 year effort of Dr Dean Ornish whose diet and lifestyle protocols to reverse heart disease are now being adopted by hospitals and insurance. The work of Caldwell Esselstyn, MD, also demonstrates the reversal of heart disease through diet and lifestyle. Ornish has also proven that prostate cancer can be reversed using the same methods.
The field of functional medicine, the clinical interface of systems biology, which has at it’s core the findings of clinical nutrition, is set to emerge as a new paradigm in medicine, superseding the old system of dividing up the body into separate areas and treating the symptoms rather than eliminating the causes of illness. Though it is estimated that it will take 20 years or more to filter through to the mainstream because of the attitudes displayed on this site. (As well as the tenacity of the pharmaceutical industry – why would it easily allow its position as the wealthiest industry in the world to be jeopardised? – the food industry and others.)
It’s quite simple: Human beings evolved to exist in an environment and lifestyle we no longer live in and to consume a diet that we no longer eat. Food is molecular ‘information’ and for 10,000 years since the dawn of agriculture we have been swallowing ‘information’ that the human body did not evolve to process. We have denatured food of its vital microorganisms that are utilised by the gut. Food is grown in soils depleted of the nutrients our bodies need. We live under stresses that the body did not evolve to cope with. The body is bombarded with industrial and other toxins it did not evolve to tackle. We live in fractured social communities and dispersed extended families that do not provide the emotional support we evolved to utilise. The future of mankind must be to intelligently recreate the past environment we evolved to exist in.
If anyone is being ‘rather trusting’ it is those that allow the giants of our economy to pull the wool over their eyes with bent science and lies. It is those who see corruption everywhere but at places where it is most prevalent and destructive. It is those who, like children, imagine a great parental force of benevolence to be watching over them. It is those who are ‘rather trusting.’
Admin edit: moved.
Read the blog before making assertions about what you imagine to be the contents. It is not an excellent modern paradigm to be clinging, as Holford and Orthomolecular proponents do to hair analysis tests, useless food allergy tests and the debunked antioxidant hypothesis, when science has examined them and found them useless?
You’re really not lacking confidence for someone who seems to have been studying this area for a whole, nearly 3 months – and such a diverse range of interest and expertise, too.
Again, any future comments, make them at least on-topic for the blog. First, read the comments policy thoroughly and do some subject-matter reading.
what people don’t seem to realise is that most bloggers just delete comments when they are stupid or rants – they don’t go through the bother of moving them. but usually all that happens is that people complain that they’re off-topic stuff is moved.
nobody ever gets anywhere by behaving well.
you do a lot of work that comes under the heading of boring but necessary. unlike holford, i bet no one’s ever offered you half a million for your pundit equity.
Admin edit: it is sad but true. Nobody will pay 500K to hear variations on, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” from more than 1 pundit and Michael Pollan (deservedly) has that sewn up.
Like dchen says, you people who are complaining don’t know when you’re well off – it’s only sceptical bloggers who make such a point of allowing comments from people who repeatedly ask for information then refuse to follow it up.
Read and learn. Even if you don’t agree, you will learn a lot about the critical analysis of a trial or study. You will learn how often Patrick Holford misreports a paper or even makes stuff up. Look at the analysis of his reporting of the Kahn paper on cinnamon. [note, Khan]
Admin edit: Khan link added.
Hey Levi thanks for the sanity.
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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants
Admin edit: good to see that you have acquired a sensible strapline from us. Again, read the comment policy – your final warning. Off-topic still means on-topic for the blog.
You keep people’s comments, you move them to reduce the white noise on a post where they’re not appropriate and people complain.
Are you sure these people aren’t sock-puppets?
These people who are complaining about attacks and then questioning why you’re not attacking, you have to wonder:
1 which bits of the internet they usually visit
2 why they think consistency without a change of circumstance is over-rated.
I am tired of reading over-hyped books and diets in the papers. It’s good to know that there are people keeping an eye on the accuracy. But the papers should be forced to print prominent retractions when Patrick Holford and people like him are wrong.