Scat obsessed TV health guru, Gillian McKeith is going to stop using the title Doctor in adverts for her range of utterly joyless foods.

The woman, who looks as if she lives on a diet of grumpy half starved hamsters, has used the title on all her promotional literature and ranges of healthy snacks.  Healthy they might be but if I want a food treat I’ll reach for toast and jam and not something that tastes like floor sweepings.

A Guardian reader (see they are useful for something other than poking fun at and being an easy stereotype) complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after reading an article which took McKeith to task over some of the claims she makes and whether or not she is qualified to make them.

Using their dictum of “Legal, Honest, Decent and Truthful” the ASA came to an initial conclusion that using the title Doctor would indeed lead people into thinking that she was a medical doctor.  One who had been to medical school and studied actual medicine.  Which she isn’t.  Somewhere in the small print will be an acknowledgement that she isn’t a real medical doctor at all.

The ASA said this wasn’t enough to dissuage the initial impression that she was a real live doctor with a medical degree as opposed to a doctorate she obtained via a long distance learning course from the American Holistic College of Nutrition (which, apparently, at the time she took the course was not recognised or accredited by any official education body).

I cannot help but wonder if the course included faecal analysis. Surely the value of such an analysis would inevitably be compromised given the enormous distance the turds had to travel through the post.

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Keywords: Diet, Doctor Who, Food, Gillian McKeith, Guardian, Health, Medical, Poo, TV