NutriProfile: dodgy ‘nutritional profiling’ service

March 9th, 2008

Recently, adverts for a service called NutriProfile sprang up through the press. Full page ads in national newspapers promised free “personalised nutrition and lifestyle recommendations” by simply by filling out a lengthy online questionnaire. Sounds great, except that NutriProfile is run by HealthSpan, a company that sells vitamins and nutritional supplements!

So, hands up who thinks that, no matter how you answer the questions, you’ll be recommended to buy some pills from HealthSpan? Being a lazy man, I forwarded the case to the reverent David Colquhoun at Improbable Science, who has done an excellent investigation of the scam. I thought David would especially like this case as the ‘nutritional experts’ who are behind the recommendations includes none other than Ann Walker, the woman who tried to shut down Improbable Science after an exposé of her dodgy herbal advice.

There’s no word yet on whether the Universities of Nottingham, Reading, and the London Metropolitan University know that they are being used as an implicit endorsement on NutriProfile’s marketing materials.

For a full and interesting tour of NutriProfile’s weird world of nutritional profiling, see David’s article here.

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