In my clean-up a few days ago and having discovered in my out tray the cutting from a South African newspaper with the article on the Holford diet, and goodness know how long it had been lying in there, we ordered the book which duly arrived and has been dipped into. I say “dipped” because I found I was unable to or didn’t want to really read it with any kind of thoroughness. Chris said he had his doubts about it when he read the article but didn’t say anything. I, having dipped into the book, now also have doubts. Why? Well in the first place the book is supposed to be about the Holford diet and what results can be obtained by sticking to it but why should it be necessary to interlace the text with letters of approbation from satisfied dieters? Surely if the diet is all it’s cracked up to be it doesn’t need this kind of bolstering puff, not in an instruction manual anyway? Is the diet merely another fad making someone, i.e. Mr Holford mega-rich on the flab of the poor desperate overweight who have been struggling with their avoirdupois (like me) for eons with little or no success. Diets come and go come and go. The last one we tried was the Atkins which worked up to a point and then stopped working and I have the feeling the same will apply to the Holford diet though I will give it a try. This is not just for the sake of losing a few pounds but because of the discovery that my blood-sugar level is far too high and could be indicative of incipient diabetes.
But now what really made me wonder about the whole thing was a review in Friday’s Mail of a book called Bad Science which informs me that Professor Patrick Holford has produced a “Qlink pendant” that protects against “evil electromagnetic fields” and can be got for£69.99 – except for the price we’re back in Victorian times here with pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. The question one asks is, has the good professor not made himself rich enough with over a million books sold world-wide and presumably still selling, after all I have just bought one, that he has to come up with this nonsense – and for seventy quid? And do people fall for it? As Barnum said, “There’s one born every minute” which must be true because, according to a survey, there are evidently mothers who actually believe Jaffa cakes are fruit! Whatever happened to education?