Here’s a really bad idea. Send a dozen nutritionists to work alongside regular doctors in a Medecins Sans Frontières team providing emergency treatment to the wounded in a war zone. It’s a bad idea because they would lack any relevant skills. They might help speed up recovery but in the operating theatre they’d be be worse than useless as the wounded come in.

 Doctors are famously uninterested in […]

Last week the front page of The Times carried a story that was an opening shot in a revolution. I’m sure that the editors didn’t intend it as that and that the readers didn’t see it that way either. It was a story about shifting from the long recommended low fat diet to one that cut back on carbohydrates instead. Standard fare for the cuddly lifestyle pages, hardly material for social upheaval.

Five hundred years ago this […]