> I'm waiting for the day that nutricionists find out that there are different kinds of people with different nutritional needs. The nutritionist side of publi

> I'm waiting for the day that nutricionists find out that there are different kinds of people with different nutritional needs. The nutritionist side of public health evolved to deal with questions where this isn't true. Everyone needs vitamin A to avoid beriberi and vitamin C to avoid scurvy; no one benefits from polluted milk or polluted water; that sort of thing. Now, the big problems have been solved, and nutritionists are trying to treat semi-ideopathic diseases of affluence as if they were the immense, obvious dietary scourges of a hundred years ago... This is true of the whole field of public health, to an extent. Cholera and yellow fever are under control, smallpox is all but extinct, polio is on its last legs, and now we're trying to use the tools that defeated those diseases to fight drug addiction, lifestyle-induced diseases, diseases of aging, and STDs. At least things aren't as bad now as they were. Traditional public-health approaches look nonsensical when used against 20th-century issues, but they did a wonderful job against 19th-century ones.