Hadley Freeman: Pseudoscience and strawberries: 'wellness' gurus should carry a health warning
....A classic of its kind will be published this week in the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine which has an interview with self-described “wellness guru”, 23-year-old Belle Gibson, who claimed in a blog to have cured her terminal brain cancer by cutting out gluten and sugar. Her blog spawned an app, which was downloaded more than 300,000 times, followed by an inevitable book, The Whole Pantry, featuring photos of brown food photographed in a perfect rustic kitchen.
So far, so zeitgeist. But there was one problem: Gibson had never had cancer. In the magazine interview, Gibson admits “None of it’s true.” As the magazine puts it, unimprovably: “She says she is passionate about avoiding gluten, dairy and coffee, but doesn’t really understand how cancer works.”
Gibson is not the first “wellness blogger” to be caught out by her own ignorance, and she certainly won’t be the last. Wellness bloggers are increasingly numerous, astonishingly popular and embarrassingly feted by the media which never can resist attractive young women (who make up the most prominent members of this demographic) talking about food and being photographed nibbling on a strawberry. They write blogs about healthy living, which invariably means randomly cutting out various food groups and gluten (although how many of them actually know what gluten is remains to be ascertained), even though most of them have no nutritional training beyond feeding themselves. They run stylised Instagram accounts showcasing their food and how attractive they look eating it, and they write in a chummy “just sayin’ it like it is, guys” style so suited to the internet. They usually have a story about how they fell ill and cured themselves through their diet. They often claim that the modern food industry is killing us all and they always suggest that if you follow their instructions to the letter you, too, will be as gorgeous as they are, and maybe even able to nibble a strawberry as sexily to boot....
Gillian McKeith, deliciously debunked by Ben Goldacre in this paper in 2007, is a kind of grandmother to today’s wellness bloggers. The former actress and Playboy model Jenny McCarthy also contributed some DNA to them with her absolute certainty in herself despite her lack of medical training. “The university of Google is where I got my degree from,” McCarthy has said, repeatedly. Since 2007, McCarthy has claimed that her son, Evan, developed autism as a result of vaccinations, and she insists that autism can be cured by healthy eating. McCarthy has been repeatedly cited as a major factor in the anti-vaccination movement in the States, which in 2012 led to a spike in whooping cough cases followed by a measles outbreak in Disneyland in California earlier this year.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/22/wellness-gurus-belle-gibson-pseudoscience
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