Gillian McKeith - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

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 smoked for many years and died of cancer of the oesophagus in 2005.

She obtained a degree in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1981, later 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. In 1994, she claims to have obtained an MA and, in 1997, a PhD, both in holistic nutrition, via a distance-learning programme from the non-accredited American Holistic College of Nutrition, later the Clayton College of Natural Health in Birmingham, Alabama (but since closed). She is a member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, but this association runs no checks on the qualifications of its certified members, permitting Ben Goldacre to register his dead cat for the same qualification as McKeith. Her website lists post-graduate membership of The Centre for Nutrition Education; certificates from the London School of Acupuncture and the Kailash Centre of Oriental Medicine; and a Master Herbalist Diploma (Honors) from The American College of Healthcare Sciences.

She met her American husband, Howard Magaziner, a lawyer, in Edinburgh, where he was spending a year studying. At the time he ran a chain of health food shops in the United States, with which she became involved. The couple now live in London and have two daughters, Skylar (born 1994) and Aston (born 2000). She suffers from scoliosis, and has said there is not a moment in her life when she is not in pain because of it.