Ding dong, the witch is dead.

Come on, didn’t you secretly crack a smile when you heard that Robert C Atkins of THAT diet died of a heart condition? Even though it wasn’t actually related to the world’s most successful and joyless diet? But you kind of hoped it was, because then you go back to having a baked potato with your steak?

Well, over in London, the smiles aren’t quite so secret as one of the country’s most obnoxious, intrusive and downright nasty diet queens (hopefully) begins her slide into disgrace and irrelevance. For years, self-described ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith has made millions by wandering into people’s homes, telling them they’re disgusting fat losers and getting them to literally smell their own shit to prove it. On TV, natch. Oh, and yeah, she writes a lot of psuedo-scientific books that tell you to eat grass, or whatever, and then sues anyone who says they’re a pile of crap.

But now, reports Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, she’s finally come a-cropper. And it’s the internerds we have to thank:

“A regular from my website badscience.net – I can barely contain my pride – took McKeith to the Advertising Standards Authority, complaining about her using the title ‘doctor’ on the basis of a qualification gained by correspondence course from a non-accredited American college. He won.

She may have sidestepped the publication of a damning ASA draft adjudication at the last minute by accepting – ‘voluntarily’ – not to call herself ‘doctor’ in her advertising any more. But would you know it, a copy of that draft adjudication has fallen into our laps, and it concludes that ‘the claim ‘Dr’ was likely to mislead’. The advert allegedly breached two clauses of the Committee of Advertising Practice code: ‘substantiation’ and ‘truthfulness’.”