A case of myth direction

Nutritional data is changing all the time. So, advice often seems contradictory and sketchy. Is breakfast essential? Is red meat evil? What's wrong with soy? Here's where science stands on the big questions

- VIR SANGHVI

Show me a doctor who is not confused about nutrition and I will show you a doctor who has not kept up with research. Though nutritionists like to claim that basic nutritional advice does not change from year to year, the truth is that each week brings new studies and new health warnings. Often they are contradictory and further confuse lay people.

Part of the problem is that many studies are financed by the food industry, which has a vested interest in the outcomes. And much of the nutritional wisdom that has been propounded over the decades does not emerge out of pure science but out of the interests of those passing on the advice.

Breakfast: Skip breakfast, you're told, and there will be damaging consequences for your health.

You can trace the roots of the advice to (surprise, surprise!) the American cereal industry and to such food faddists as the Kellogg family (owners of the eponymous cereal company).

People do eat breakfast all over the world but they do not necessarily attach such great importance to it. In France, breakfast may well consist of black coffee and a cigarette. The cigarette is not a good idea but the absence of solid food in the morning doesn't hurt the French very much. Until the fast food industry spread all over France in the last decade or so, the French had much lower rates of heart disease than most English-speaking countries.