Nutrition is one of those subjects which comes up every day in general practice—or should do—yet in most undergraduate medical schools it is crowded out by the big clinical specialities and high technology procedures. It is for subjects like nutrition that the British Medical Journal’s ABC series is extremely useful.

This book was started when Dr Stephen Lock, previous editor of the BMJ asked me to write a series of weekly articles for an imagined general practitioner, in an unfashionable provincial town who had been taught almost no nutrition at medical school. They now felt the need to use nutrition in the practice, but could spare only 15 to 20 minutes a week to read about it.

The brief was that the writing must be practical and relevant; about half the page was to be for tables, figures, photographs or boxes (that is, not text) and these have to tell part of the story. The writing was to “come down off the fence”, to make up its mind on the balance of evidence and state it plainly. The first edition had no references but some reviewers asked for them and now in the era of evidence-based medicine some well chosen references seem indispensable when writing about nutrition. Nutritional concepts, of course, are not as tightly evidence-based as information about drugs because randomised controlled trials, so routine for drug therapy, are rare for nutrition.

This book does not deal with all aspects of human nutrition, only those that are useful in everyday medical practice. The latest fads and controversies are not here either. This is the ABC of Nutrition, not the XYZ.