Cheaply satisfying our taste for sweet, salt and fat has not only led to increased heart and blood vessel disease, but reduced our appetite for fish, fruits and vegetables. These contain "micronutrients", essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, which are also essential for healthy heart and brain. At the age of 30, Hugh Sinclair, a brilliant biochemist at Magdalen College, Oxford, helped to persuade the Second World War government to provide free cod liver oil, malt extract and orange juice to all pregnant mothers and their children to counteract the deficiencies he'd found in the diets of East Enders. He said that the average Brit's diet then, despite the food shortages, was far better than now.

Most of us eat far too few fruits and vegetables and hardly any fish. We have therefore been rewarded with a rising tide not only of cardiovascular disease, but also of impaired brain function. This causes impaired cognition and lack of self-control, which spawns industrial inefficiency, social instability and violence. Small studies in vulnerable groups have suggested that giving people daily capsules containing the most important micronutrients could help reverse our deteriorating intelligence and literacy, inattention, impulsiveness, violence and even ward off Alzheimer's. Perhaps we should return to Hugh Sinclair's policy of giving them to everyone.