For a couple of months now, I’ve had the odd feeling that Patrick Holford has been following me around. Every week he’s been sending me e-mails telling me that I should buy a certain brand of tea or a certain brand of supplements because they’re what he uses. He’s been on BBC’s
Horizon telling me that high doses of vitamin supplements are healthy and safe. He’s been inviting me (on behalf of Nairn’s Oatcakes) to have a glycaemic index breakfast with him at a posh club. And he’s been sending me press releases welcoming new research about an allergy tester that happens to be available for sale on his website.
So I arrive early one morning at his home in Putney, West London, to interview him, and the first thing I see is the most enormous sign on the door saying: “No junk mail, newsletters, salesmen”. You have to laugh. You might call Holford a salesman, but that would be unfair. He’s an evangelist. A clinical psychologist by training, a born-again nutritionist since his early twenties, he has become the focus of public debate about whether or not we should be taking vitamin supplements and spends every moment God sends spreading the word about his philosophy of Optimum Nutrition. He’s even written his own scripture — the Optimum Nutrition Bible, a new edition of which is published this week.
Holford, 46, believes that food and nutritional supplements can be used in the same way as drugs. Unlike most conventional doctors and dietitians who believe that you can do no better than eat a healthy, balanced diet if you want to stay well, he says that’s good but not enough. Only by taking high doses of vitamins and other supplements — much higher than the officially recommended amounts — can we achieve the level of nutrients required to make our bodies work as well as they can.
Stated baldly, his beliefs sound cranky, but they are not without genuine merit. He is fastidious in conducting legitimate research to back his claims. With the support of the Nobel prizewinner Dr Linus Pauling, Holford established the Institute for Optimum Nutrition in 1984 — an independent charity researching nutrition, training nutritionists and treating patients. The centre, in West London, has achieved startling results. For example, a study of people with hypertension attending the institute showed that they achieved an average eight-point drop in blood pressure using antioxidant, fish oil and vitamin C supplements.
But despite millions of people subscribing to his websites and buying his 20-odd books — and the thousands more who will follow The Holford Diet (to be published by Piatkus Books, £7.99, on January 5) — Holford provokes a lot of ill-feeling. At the Science Museum last month he became involved in a slanging match during a public debate on controversial research which suggests that high- dose vitamin supplementation might be linked to breast and gastrointestinal cancers. The other panellists became frustrated that Holford’s pro-supplement sloganising misrepresented the science. Catherine Collins, the chief dietitian at St George’s Hospital, London, said some of his claims about the benefits of food and vitamins were “flaky”. An increasingly flustered Holford accused her of scaremongering. It was all quite entertaining, but none of the audience emerged any the wiser.
I have my worries, too. How, for example, can Holford justify the claim in his Optimum Nutrition Bible that he was ten years ahead in cautioning against HRT (hormone replacement therapy) because of its link with breast cancer — “a fact now well proven” — when the research is still hotly debated? Alarm bells ring every time he says something is “well established”. There’s also the worry that his marketing jaunts devalue any claim he has to scientific objectivity. It doesn’t help us to find the truth about the benefits of vitamin supplementation when none of the so-called “authorities” seems able to provide a view free of vested interests.
“Simon,” he says warmly, bounding barefoot down the stairs, as if he’s known me for years (we’ve met once before). He sits me at his breakfast table, where there are three capsules laid in a row — his power supplements for the morning. High-dose capsules of omega-6 and 3 oils, vitamin C, and an “advanced” capsule containing a combination of vitamins, minerals and herbs. Then he sets about preparing me an optimum nutrition breakfast, a delicious mix of oats, oat bran and seeds whizzed together, topped with strawberries, blueberries and soya milk, and accompanied by rye bread with organic butter and jam. There’s tea, too, but I don’t dare ask for sugar.
He engages me in a convincing demolition of the way the Department of Health devised its recommended daily amount of vitamin C (it’s about 15 times lower than the daily amount Holford recommends). He has no argument with the official recommended dose if it were advertised as the amount required to prevent scurvy, but that has nothing to do with promoting health, he says. The flow of his argument is seamless. But when I mention the whole money question, he clearly takes it to heart. “I’m happy to promote something that I think adds value to people’s health,” he says. He’s quick to acknowledge that he earns commission for promoting the specially formulated high-dose supplements from the nutrional health company Higher Nature (www.highernature.co.uk), though he denies that his product promotions bring great rewards.
What would I do, he asks, if I believed strongly in the benefits of one particular formulation which was not available and a company said they’d put it together for me? I suggest that I’d have to make some decisions about how seriously I wanted people to take me. “It’s true I am tainted, by association,” he says. “But you find me a professor or a nutritionist who isn’t paid for by someone. I believe passionately about promoting health.” I believe him. What convinces me more than anything are the references to his own sickly childhood and the transforming effect that dietary change had on his health.
His anger at the lack of funding for research into diet and health is genuine. A study he wants to conduct with Professor David Smith, an authority on Alzheimer’s in Oxford, on whether the disease can be prevented through supplementation with vitamins B6, B12 and folic acid, cannot go forward because no one will provide the £50,000 needed. “There are immense political obstacles created by the pharmaceutical industry and all its vested interests that are making it incredibly difficult to get good science and the concept of optimum nutrition into medicine. It’s a very slow struggle. “I’m on a mission to get my message through to the public and if it were possible to do it through the scientific journals I would.”
That’s why he’s content to describe himself as a “communicator” with a scientific approach rather than a scientist. Not prepared to wait for countless trials to come up with vague conclusions, he will make a definitive statement about risk or benefit before anyone else. Hence his rather arrogant claim that he was ten years ahead in advising of the dangers of antidepressants, and of lead in petrol, and advocating the use of antioxidants to slow ageing and to reduce cancer. It’s a perilous and egocentric mission.
If only he could shake off that zeal, that lilt, and all that off-putting marketing, he might not face such an uphill battle. The logic and the science aren’t entirely against him. Who knows? One day his kingdom may come.
The New Optimum Nutrition Bible. by Patrick Holford. is published by Piatkus Books, £12.99; www.patrickholford.com
HOLFORD’S HERESIES
Research about health and diet, released by the Institute for Optimum Nutrition this week, claims that three quarters of the British population suffer from low energy and high stress and that half have regular headaches and depression. The study of 37,000 people compared what kinds of food they ate with how well they felt. It found that:
People who drink eight glasses of water a day are twice as likely to be in optimum health.
