Gillian McKeith

Gillian McKeith (born 28 September 1959) is a Scottish television personality and writer. She is known for her promotion of various pseudoscientific ideas about health and nutrition. She is the former host of Channel 4's You Are What You Eat (2004–2006), Granada Television's Dr Gillian McKeith's Feel Fab Forever (2009–2010), and W Network's Eat Yourself Sexy (2010). In 2008, McKeith regularly appeared on the E4 health show Supersize vs Superskinny, and in 2010, she was a contestant on the tenth series of the ITV show I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!.

Numerous practices supported by McKeith are pseudoscience not supported by scientific research, such as the detox diet, colonic irrigation, and her claims that examining the tongue and stool samples can be used to identify ailments and dietary needs. McKeith has no qualifications in nutrition or medicine from accredited institutions, and in 2007 agreed with the Advertising Standards Authority to stop using the title "Doctor".

McKeith has written several books about nutrition, including You Are What You Eat (2004), which sold more than two million copies, and Dr Gillian McKeith's Ultimate Health Plan (2006). The validity of her approach and the safety of her recommendations have been strongly criticised by health professionals. She faced criticism during the COVID-19 pandemic for promoting COVID-19 misinformation and anti-vaccine views, and was described as a conspiracy theorist.

McKeith was born in Perth, Scotland, and grew up on a council estate. Her father, Robert, was a shipyard worker and her mother an office worker. She has said that she was raised eating the junk food she now advises against: "We all know the kind of food I grew up with—a typical Scottish diet. We'd have meat three times a day. I certainly never ate a mango, and had no idea what macrobiotic meant." Her father was a long-term smoker and died of cancer of the oesophagus in 2005.

She obtained a degree in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1981, before moving to the United States, where she worked in marketing and international business. In 1984, she received an MA in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania. She claims to have received an MA in holistic nutrition in 1994 and a PhD in that same field in 1997, both via distance-learning programmes from the non-accredited American Holistic College of Nutrition, later the Clayton College of Natural Health in Birmingham, Alabama, since closed. She is a member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, but this association runs no checks on the qualifications of its members; this allowed British physician Ben Goldacre to register his dead cat for the same membership held by McKeith.

In February 2007, she agreed to stop using the academic title "Doctor" in advertisements, after a complaint to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority. Responding to criticism that her use of her qualifications in linguistics and language and international relations, subjects entirely unrelated to diet and nutrition, are misleading to the public, McKeith said she was challenging orthodox medical opinions. She rejected the claim that using the title to promote her theories on nutrition was unethical.

McKeith and her husband have alleged defamation but failed to initiate threatened legal action against critics. Ben Goldacre speculated that parts of her PhD thesis may have been published as a 48-page pamphlet entitled "Miracle Superfood: Wild Blue-Green Algae"; he called the pamphlet cargo cult science, describing it as full of "anecdote, but no data." In his book Bad Science (2008) Goldacre dedicates a chapter to an analysis of her scientific credibility. In July 2010, on Twitter, McKeith described Goldacre's book as "lies"; Goldacre requested a correction.

According to her Channel 4 biography, McKeith was celebrity health reporter for the Joan Rivers show, and when McKeith first moved to the United States she co-presented a syndicated radio show called Healthline Across America.