IN MY VIEW... FOOD CAN BE THE BEST MEDICINE

‘LET food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’ is perhaps one of the best-known dicta of Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine.

It’s a phrase I’ve used previously in these pages, expressing regret that student doctors have almost zero training in nutrition during their six years at university.

Given that we are the most obese country in Europe, with 27 per cent of our population officially obese and with excess weight driving heart disease, diabetes, stroke and some forms of cancer, we clearly need to do something to address what and how we as a nation eat.

Yet by virtue of their training — or lack of it — GPs have remained peculiarly ill-equipped to help with this task. However, at last the world is changing and I rejoice at the arrival of Culinary Medicine UK, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to teach doctors more about both how to cook and the importance of nutrition — a marriage of the art of cooking with the science of medicine. The idea is they can then pass on their knowledge to patients.

Founded by Rupy Aujla, a GP in Primrose Hill, North London, it promotes the idea that what we eat is one of the most important factors for better health.

At last! But surely it must be time that this same philosophy is also allowed to permeate the teaching of home economics in schools. If both are permitted to gather pace, I have no doubt it would be a new way of bringing economy and efficiency to the NHS.