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There is only one diet that humans have not been able to adapt to – the modern ‘western diet’, writes WILLIAM REVILLE

‘EAT FOOD. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.” These lines open Michael Pollan’s book In Defence of Food (Penguin, 2008). I fully agree with the message in these lines and with almost everything else in this book, a tour de force of common sense about food and diet and a devastating critique of the ideology of nutritionism.