Quack record

Bestselling health and fitness guru Gary Null weighs in on AIDS. Almost all of what he says is useless, dangerous and just plain wrong.

By Peter Kurth

May 21, 2002 | Before I get down to discussing Gary Null, Ph.D., and his massive, irresponsible and nearly unreadable book, "AIDS: A Second Opinion," I need to confess my bias. I've been infected with HIV for a long time -- since 1983, by my own calculation. For 13 years, since I first discovered my sero status, I've been taking anti-retroviral medications, the so-called AIDS cocktail, in various strengths and combinations. I haven't been off the pills in all that time. Apart from neuropathy in my hands and feet, I'm in good health, with no detectable virus and T-cells in the normal range -- in other words, my immune system is functioning as it should.

By contrast, a friend, infected for as long as I've been, died a few days ago of "AIDS-related complications." This was someone who worked out, lifted weights and once walked the length and breadth of the state of Vermont to raise money for AIDS and prove he could do it. In recent years, two sero-positive friends have dropped dead of heart attacks after embarking on healthful, "life-enhancing" diet and exercise regimes. I can't be impartial about Gary Null's book. I am also not an idiot, which I think Null takes me for.

Null -- a nutritionist, lecturer, broadcaster, "educator" and "one of America's leading health and fitness writers and alternative practitioners," according to his publicity -- is the author of more than 100 books, treatises and tracts on stress-free living, anti-aging, proper eating, "springtime cleansing," "lifetime dieting," "healing with magnets," "juicing," weight management and "life changes." Gary Null, Ph.D., isn't just a man but an industry, whose Web site offers for sale not just "Gary Null's Friendly Fiber" -- "easy come, easy go" -- but a whole Sears catalog of pricey Gary Null products ("Gary's Incredible Green Stuff!" "Great New Videos Every Week!"), along with live chats, sermons, Web links and Null's philosophical musings on "world issues."

In addition to his role as a fitness guru, Null is the kind of pop-psych P.T. Barnum, never absent in a crisis, who will "help you find answers" to those really tough questions: "What rules don't I want to obey anymore?" "Who in my life is toxic?" "What can I do without a lot of money?" (Answer: "Pay attention to the oft-ignored simpler, non-materialistic side.")

He's also a longtime AIDS denialist, or "dissident," as they're called, part of a loose fraternity of scientists, patients and (mainly) quacks who insist that AIDS is a false epidemic; that HIV either doesn't cause it or doesn't really exist; that the medications normally taken to fight the virus are pure poison, foisted on a frightened population by the pharmaceutical industry -- and other claims, not all of them wacky, along this basic line. Generally, an AIDS dissident is one who rejects the accepted formula "HIV=AIDS" and proposes an alternative model -- and thus alternative treatments -- for a condition many doctors and their infected patients are now routinely calling "HIV disease."

Null himself has been beating the anti-AIDS drum since at least 1994, when he wrote a column for Penthouse magazine titled "AIDS Is Not a Death Sentence," and introduced four "survivors" with stories of natural healing -- one through "hypothermia," another with "bitter melon," a third "holistically" or with dinitrochlorobenzene (DNCB), a briefly faddish "immunity booster," long ago proved, like the others, to be useless in defeating the virus. None of these therapies can be demonstrated to have worked for anyone.

Then as now, Null subscribed to a discredited "cofactor" theory of AIDS, which held that HIV couldn't and wouldn't spread far beyond the high-risk groups in which it was first observed -- intravenous drug users, homosexual men pursuing "a promiscuous, fast-track gay lifestyle," hemophiliacs and others unlucky enough to have needed "blood transfusions and blood-factor products," people whose immunity, Null baldly asserts, is likely to be compromised in the first place.

"Unfortunately," Null reported in Penthouse, "both blood transfusions and such products as Factor 8, taken by hemophiliacs, can cause immune suppression and make one more susceptible to any infection, including HIV." There was no knowing at the time he wrote the column how the burden of infection worldwide would shift increasingly to women, or how many healthcare workers, with one hapless prick of the needle, would experience the same course of illness as any promiscuous, fast-track lowlife. But now we do know, and Null still hasn't changed his tune.

In last year's primer, "Seven Steps to Perfect Health," Null recommended what he does to everyone, all the time, whether or not they're infected with a killer virus: a strict vegetarian diet; no processed foods; no dairy products, sugar, preservatives, coffee, tea or cola, etc.; multiple glasses every day of fresh fruit or vegetable juice -- preferably squeezed from a $249.95 "Gary Null Juicer"; whole grains; nuts; seeds; seaweed; enemas; exercise; stress reduction and "pure water," without fluoride or any other chemicals in it. You might want to look at your "environment," too, Null suggests, for dust, mold and the residue of poisonous household cleansers. But above all, "embrace change," get rid of those cynical, "toxic" attitudes and move forward to your goal!

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