5th October 2026

Newsletter Monday

Hello Reader,

Food gets so much more attention than exercise these days.

We all have to eat.

Exercise remains, unfortunately, optional.

Declare a food group dangerous and you’ve given everyone something to worry about at their next supermarket shop.

The algorithms love it.

Journalists get an article.

The rest of us stand in the bread aisle wondering whether lunch is trying to kill us.

I’m interested in nutrition too. I’ve spent enough years as a GP to see how much people’s eating habits can matter to their health.

But several recent research stories have brought me back to the same point:

What matters is what your diet looks like OVERALL. Week after week, year after year.

We give individual foods and nutrients an enormous amount of attention.

Meanwhile, the pattern we keep repeating can slip past almost unnoticed.

And that pattern can change.

​A recent review of 87 trials looked at wholegrains and found small improvements in several measures, including cholesterol, blood pressure and blood glucose.

No earth-shattering revelation. No reason to start treating brown rice like a prescription drug.

But it was a welcome reminder to take another look at my own lunches.

The last few weeks have involved some personal upheaval, and my own nutrition has slipped right down the priority list. There’s been more grabbing whatever is convenient and less thinking ahead.

So last week I made some quinoa for the week’s lunches. This week, it’s pearl barley.

Hardly a dramatic transformation. But a practical change to what I regularly put on my plate at lunchtime now I am back at home.

Can I claim that swapping a Bounty for quinoa four days in a row has made me significantly healthier?

Probably not.

(Yes, a Bounty really was lunch on one particularly stressful day. It was what I had to hand.)

I certainly felt better. Was some of that simply knowing I’d eaten a more nutritious lunch? Quite possibly. I’ll take it nonetheless.

But four lunches don’t tell the whole story. What matters is whether this becomes something I regularly do.

It reminded me of a line from an email I received: “Your body is a reflection of your training and diet in the last six months.”

Yep. I felt seen there too.

Six months isn’t a precise biological deadline, and your appearance can’t tell you everything about your health.

But as a prompt for an honest stocktake, it landed.

And when a headline promises that one food will transform your health, it deserves an equally honest look.

However impressive a nutrition headline sounds, we have to know what the researchers actually measured.

Did they ask people what they usually ate and look for links with their health?

Or did they change what people ate and compare the results with a control group?

Those are different kinds of evidence.

The wholegrain review included randomised trials. Excellent.

​Another recent study looked at the usual dietary patterns of 1,769 adults aged 60 and over, alongside blood markers related to metabolism, inflammation and other processes relevant to ageing.

Healthier dietary patterns were associated with more favourable levels of several markers.

This isn’t a surprise, is it, really?

But it doesn’t establish cause and effect. The researchers were looking at how people generally ate, not whether they’d had one particularly virtuous lunch on repeat for a week, or any one ingredient.

You can control someone’s diet for a short trial. Controlling everything they eat for decades, alongside everything else that affects their health, is another matter.

So we need to keep individual findings in perspective.

A Bounty for lunch on three stressful days doesn’t undo six months of generally nutritious eating.

Equally, four quinoa lunches don’t transform a diet that has been lacking for years.

As a GP, I’ve often been more struck by what’s missing from people’s diets than by what’s in them.

Fish, pulses, nuts, vegetables, wholegrains, even fruit—sometimes they barely feature at all. Yet we can spend an extraordinary amount of time debating one ingredient in something they do eat.

Individual foods and nutrients can matter. But they sit within a much bigger picture.

Rather than disappearing down another nutritional rabbit hole, have a look at your usual meals.

Is there something nutritious you enjoy that could make a more regular appearance?

What matters is what becomes usual.

What regularly makes it onto your plate and what rarely gets a look-in.