When doctors start talking about diet, patients are well advised to head for the door. A glance at the history of medicine reveals that doctors have always resorted to recommending diets when they have had no effective treatments — a state of affairs that prevailed from antiquity until the 1930s. Dietary protocols for numerous conditions, from insulin-dependent diabetes to pernicious anaemia, have disappeared with the development of new drugs or other forms of therapy. Take peptic ulcers. Patients survived for decades on fish and milk and other grim regimes, all prescribed in dogmatic detail and all of negligible benefit. Yet once effective acid-blockers appeared in the 1970s all talk of diet ceased, or at least migrated to the alternative health fringe.
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