Duck out of quack nutrition

Desperation leads to vulnerability and this is where the cowboys come in, promising the world, charging lots, but delivering little.

A much-blogged example is Stanislaw Burzynski, whose clinic in Houston, Texas, claims to provide innovative, cutting-edge "Personalised Gene-Targeted Cancer Therapy". But no independent studies have been able to confirm or reproduce what few results Burzynski has published and his treatments have been called scientific nonsense by a number of people, including Cancer Research UK.

Despite this, patients still scrape together the huge sums he charges and celebs even help raise funds to send cancer patients to his clinic - even though there is no evidence for the success of his treatments.

Quackery abounds in the field of diet and nutrition. Superfoods and vitamin supplements are a myth, while a recent study by Which? magazine found that nutritionists are providing advice that could harm health. The researchers posed as patients with a range of problems and visited a range of "nutritional therapists" for advice. All but one offered either potentially dangerous or misleading advice.

One researcher, posing as a breast cancer sufferer, was told to delay the radiotherapy treatment recommended by her oncologist, saying they could rid the body of cancer through diet. If we could cure cancer through diet instead of toxic, costly drugs and radiotherapy we would be doing it. The simple truth is that we can't. Another therapist advised a researcher not to contact his GP as they "wouldn't understand what was happening".

As well as crank treatments many therapists also offer diagnostic tests that will diagnose absolutely nothing. Diseases cannot be diagnosed from the iris, from hair samples, from holding test tubes of substances and measuring muscle tone or from tarot cards. Do your own research into these methods before parting with any money, as chances are they will disappoint.

It is admirable to seek help for dietary and weight issues, as doing it alone can be hard, but choose wisely. Look for evidence of recognised qualifications. A trained dietician is very different indeed from a nutritional therapist.

Anyone can set up shop as a nutrition therapist, with no qualifications, but registered dieticians in the UK are educated to degree level and must be registered with the Health Professions Council. If a therapist blinds with science, then the chances are there is little science to back up their claims. Best avoided.

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