Nutrition

Geoffrey P. Webb holds a BSc degree in physiology and biochemistry, a PhD from the University of Southampton and an MSc (distinction and Yudkin prize) in Nutrition from King's College, London. He became a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2014. In the early part of his career, he performed bench research on vitamin D, obesity and diabetes. He led an obesity research group in the 1980s and published data which seriously challenged the then fashionable notion that a defect in heat generation (thermogenesis) by brown fat might be an important cause of obesity. He spent most of his academic career at the University of East London and was a visiting professor at the University of North Florida in 1992 and spent a year's study leave at King's College London (1986-7).He has a wide expertise across nutrition and the other medical and biological sciences and considerable experience of writing and presenting to audiences ranging from academic scientists through students to the general newspaper-reading public. Since the late 1980s, he focused his scholarly efforts on writing books, book chapters and review articles. Several of his articles and reviews have related to discussion of major scientific errors or critical discussion of the research methods used by biomedical/nutritional scientists including epidemiology and the use of animal models. He published four books which have all been delivered to agreed deadlines and have so far yielded nine editions plus some translations into Spanish and one into Polish. He wrote a monthly "nutrition and health" column for a local East London newspaper, the Newham Recorder, for three years. He was on the editorial board of the British Journal of Nutrition for about eight years. He wrote a couple of articles for the online magazine/newspaper The Conversation. He maintains an active blog for several years and published pieces here about aspects of nutrition, health, the biomedical research process, major scientific errors and research fraud.