Christopher Walker

I did not come to this through a career plan. I came to it because a pituitary tumor rearranged my hormones before I was old enough to understand what hormones did, and nobody around me could explain what was happening in terms I could actually act on.

So I went and learned it myself, which meant neuroscience at Duke, finished in three years, mostly because I was in a hurry to get an answer.

What I found was not a secret formula. It was an absence.

Most nutrition advice hands you a rule and asks you to trust it, and the mechanism that would let anyone check that rule is almost never included. Without it there is no way to tell a sound rule from a confidently delivered one, which is how a sensible person follows ten reasonable-sounding rules and ends up further from where they started.

So I write the mechanism first and let you decide what to do with it.

Some of what follows from that is unfashionable: that sugar is closer to a solution than a problem, that most people are badly underspending on salt and badly overspending on supplements, and that a body which feels broken is usually responding correctly to inputs that deserve the blame.

Disagree with any of it you like, but the one thing you should never have to do is take it on faith.