‘Dr” Gillian McKeith, the unhealthy looking and quasi-coprophiliac “health guru” who humiliates fat people on television, last week agreed to drop the “doctor” part of her name in advertisements. This followed an investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority, which had come to the preliminary conclusion that the use of the word was likely to mislead the public. McKeith at this point agreed to its removal, which means that the ASA’s adjudication will not now be published, since McKeith’s company, the grandly named McKeith Research, withdrew the word “doctor” voluntarily.

It’s not the first time that McKeith has been censured by regulators and there seems to be a question mark over the validity of some of her qualifications. Ben Goldacre, the journalist and (real) doctor, pointed out last week that his dead cat, Hettie, was, like McKeith, a “certified professional member” of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, the membership having been bought online for $60.

What’s interesting about this is how willing people are to suspend disbelief when it comes to “improving” themselves. I look at McKeith and I think, “If eating like you means looking as unwell as you, thanks, but no thanks.”

Presumably this isn’t that wildly unusual a reaction — I mean, we all have eyes. And yet people appear to be queueing up to be humiliated by her on television, told that their insides are like cesspits and worse and have their excrement examined in public. Perhaps they’re just desperate — in which case it seems unkind, to put it mildly, to reduce some of them to tears of shame and self-disgust on national television.

But anyway: my point is, whatever happened to instinct? Do hundreds of thousands of people really need to be told how to eat — to be told that guzzling vast quantities of chips is bad for you, or that drinking water is better than drinking the fluorescent fizzy stuff? I don’t want to sound hypocritical here, having just written a diet book, but I do think that the reason why the book has done well is that my co-author and I make no claims of expertise whatsoever — quite the contrary, in fact. The approach is clearly not without appeal.

Yet elsewhere the public’s appetite for “experts” seems insatiable. People who have babies get their knickers in the most terrible twist, agonising over which “childcare expert” they should turn to for advice. The childless Gina Ford is a popular choice, completely inexplicably to me (she once informed me that her lawyers watched me closely, so I’d just like to pause here and give them a cheery wave).

In some childcare experts’ hands, a three-month-old baby is no longer just a sweet little baby but a difficult and demanding creature that must be bossed into conforming to certain parent-pleasing patterns — instead of being left in peace to get on with its own baby-pleasing little routine of sleeping, eating, filling nappies and being kissed.

Once that’s happened, the poor old baby is quite likely to be dragged from one “expert” to another during its infancy — something that would be understandable if the child were ill, but that makes no sense at all given that it’s healthy. And yet here they come: the osteopaths, the naturopaths, the homeopaths, the baby massage “expert”, the child nutritionist, the sleep adviser, on and on. It’s like a parallel universe populated by mad people. And yet the parents all have instincts, which they have decided not to trust. Why?

In some quarters I’m sure this loony kind of behaviour is born out of love — out of wanting one’s child to have the best of everything and not taking any chances. But the end result is overcoddling to the point that an older child, already worked incredibly hard at school, doesn’t have time to play outside in the evening because of a) homework; b) music; c) drama; d) fencing; e) astrophysics; f) Sanskrit (probably), and so on.

Whatever happened to running about prodding things with sticks and getting muddy? And then, of course, when the child rightly rebels against this hothousing onslaught — showing, at least, that its spirit hasn’t been entirely crushed — its well-meaning parents call in the child psychologist. Because they trust an expert and they don’t trust themselves.

They’re everywhere, the experts. We can’t cook any more, apparently — we need armies of people telling us how to address the problematic question of vegetables. We can’t have relationships without ludicrous self-help books in which complete strangers, usually American, usually low on charm, tell you very specifically what to say or not to say to your boyfriend. It’s all very well making fun of them — I wish we’d do it more often — but these books, DVDs, guides and manuals sell by the million.

What’s wrong with us? We can’t even have sex. You’d think it wasn’t that complicated and that in this department, if in no other, instinct might take over but apparently it’s not simple at all. It’s rocket science and we need TV shows to tell us how we’re doing it wrong, more guidebooks, more “experts”. It’s like a collective form of extreme hypochondria.

What I’d really like to know — unfortunately, there’s no research available that I can find — is whether this Niagara of “expert advice” actually improves anyone’s quality of life. From my observations, it just makes people anxious, stressed and dissatisfied, but I could be wrong — maybe paying someone to tell you that yellow makes you look a bit peaky is as genuinely helpful as going to see a good mortgage adviser. But our collective willingness to suspend disbelief and to dole out large sums for the privilege would suggest some problem with self-esteem. Are we really that lost? Is everything really that confusing?

It would seem so. Our own opinions count for nothing until they have been backed up by some random bogus person banging on about “research” and “findings”. We clearly feel that life is, or ought to be, reducible to a series of instructions, a bit like a bookcase from Ikea, and that we couldn’t possibly work out the instructions for ourselves using a mixture of instinct and experience. Like needy children, we need approbation at every turn.

Expertise used to be interesting. You’d listen, frowning with concentration, as some boffin on Newsnight explained some otherwise impenetrable piece of complicated science, and you’d go to bed feeling you’d learnt something. That still happens, thank God, but real experts have become the minority. These days everyone’s an expert: no subject is too small, too insignificant or too ridiculous — and no qualification too bogus.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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