I actually think that in relation to nutrition, our country has for a long time focussed too much on what people shouldn't be consuming rather than on what they should be consuming.
I was horrified when not many years ago, it was me that diagnosed a friend with dementia. She first showed signs in her forties and her GP kept asking how much she drank. In the end she thought she'd convinced him when he said it must be MS. But no neurology referral or tests.
Later I spotted she was confabulating (brain compensating for memory failure by creating false memories) and it turned out to be Korsakoff's dementia, caused by vitamin B1 deficiency. In this country almost all the people with it are alcoholic. So her GP's instinct as regards condition was right, but the cause was wrong. Her diet, not a British one, just one she'd taken to whilst on holiday, was B1 deficient. His failure to refer to neurology probably meant that he still thought she was alcoholic until I sent her back to him telling her to say what I'd spotted.
Also, when I previously went night-blind, that was caused by vitamin A deficiency because my pancreas wasn't working properly. The neurologist failed to pick up on that when I mentioned the night-blindness, asking if it could have the same cause as the ataxia. I researched it and called my GP, who agreed with me and said to take an extra supplement (I was already taking 100% RDA vit A as part of my routine daily supplement tablet), but also didn't spot the ataxia connection. It was only later that the penny dropped that vitamin E deficiency can cause ataxia and if your pancreas doesn't work properly, you don't absorb vitamin E properly either. My neurologist nodded vigorously when I told him my theory.
So how many other people out there have nutritional deficiencies that aren't being picked up, aren't being treated etc?
Caution - ranty ranty about school milk & meals. It bugs me so much that not only did Thatcher stop free school milk in England (I genuinely don't know about the rest of the UK), and various later governments, Tory, coalition and Labour messed around with funding and requirements so that kids couldn't be sure of a genuinely healthy school dinner, but in a high-pressure, hard-sell junk food environment, we've lost the public information about what you do need to eat.
Malnutrition is causing children to be admitted to hospitals.
If I had my way, every child would, regardless of their parents' income or wealth, be given a vitamin and mineral supplement every day at school and, during the school holidays, at the local play centre or similar.
Oh, I forgot, not if it's the third or subsequent child of parents on their uppers. We have to punish them for their parents' failure to comply with Iain Duncan Smith's rule, don't we, by imposing nutritional deficiency on them. (What's otherwise known as starvation or, if you're lucky, whatever people put in foodbank collection baskets, which as I see it, is mostly biscuits and pasta, which isn't to decry the donors, who are trying to give food that doesn't need cooking facilities and doesn't go off on the foodbank shelf.)
Anyway if anyone's had the energy to read that, huge hugs to those of you with an iron problem, however caused. It sounds horribly exhausting.
