Health expert Dr Giles Yeo travels the globe to uncover the truth behind the diet trend in new BBC documentary
FROM green juice detoxes to bone broth cleanses, a variety of bizarre health fads have popped up under the ‘cleaning eating’ craze.
But now a ground-breaking BBC 2 documentary, Clean Eating: The Dirty Truth, has sifted the food fact from the dirty fiction.
In the Horizon programme, Dr Giles Yeo, a Cambridge biochemist, reveals how a fake doctor behind the popular ‘alkalising diet’ charged a terminally ill Brit £63,000 for treatments she believed would cure her breast cancer.
Naima Houder-Mohammed, a 27-year-old British Army captain, died after staying at Robert Young’s pH ranch in California, where alkalising diets were promoted as a “miracle” treatment.
Her friend Afzal Amin told the show: “Naima was a fighter, she fought her way through her life in everything that she did. She refused to accept that this was the end.”
The alkaline diet maintains that our health is dictated by changes in pH levels, so eating more alkaline-rich foods (such as kale, broccoli and avocado) and avoiding acidic foods (meat and dairy) keeps our liver and kidneys healthy.
Dr Yeo said this is “utterly at odds with the medical consensus”.
He added: “I have studied haematology — the blood — for years, and it’s true that it has a slightly alkaline pH, but there is nothing you can eat that will change that.”
Young, 64, who describes himself as a microbiologist, believes the diet can cure ailments and diseases.
He has sold over four million books and opened a private clinic for cancer patients, racking up an millions in the process.
In the past, chronically ill patients have been charged up to £2,000 a night for ‘treatments’ that promised to ease their pain, with some racking up bills of £100,000.
In 2014 it was discovered he had no medical training or licence.
He is currently in prison, having being found guilty of two counts of practising medicine without a licence and faces three more years behind bars when he is sentenced in May.
Of 81 cancer patients treated at the ranch, none outlived their original prognosis.
Dr Yeo commented: “It’s really quite some wild thoughts from Robert which goes against all medical dogma.
“He’s not looking at it from a scientific basis. It’s anti-fact, anti-intellectual and a very troubling narrative.”
Meanwhile, the programme also features Ella Mills, the 25-year-old internet star behind the Deliciously Ella phenomena.
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Ella – who was Ella Woodward before she married – has written widely on the benefits of cutting out meat, dairy and refined sugar.
But now she has distanced herself from the clean-eating food gurus who make claims for which there is no scientific evidence.
She told Dr Yeo: "Clean now implies dirty and that's negative.
“I haven't used it, but as far as I understood it when I first read the term, it meant natural, kind of unprocessed, and now it doesn't mean that at all. It means diet, it means fad".
Dr Yeo also examined the claims of the Hemsley sisters, who advocate not just gluten-free but grain-free cooking.
The Hemsley sisters and Natasha Corrett, who popularises alkaline eating through her Honestly Healthy brand, were invited onto the programme but chose not to appear.
Clean Eating: The Dirty Truth is now available on BBC iPlayer