About This Site

www.stewartnutrition.co.uk is the professional web site of Dr Alan Stewart and is provided as a service to interested professionals and students as well as patients.  It is not a commercial web site and does not sell anything or recommend any company’s products.  The emphasis is upon reliable information about nutrition.

Background

The website was launched in July 2005 and has been thoroughly revised in June 2008 after a considerable amount of work writing the large technical content of the site. 
It is the author’s opinion as an independent medical practitioner specialising in nutrition that:

• nutrition remains the Cinderella of the medical specialities despite its huge scientific basis
• reliable meaningful information about nutrition is often hard to come by and much advice that is given is tainted by commercial interest or the involvement of the capricious media
• turning the individual’s attention to their diet allows them to become, in part, responsible for their own health problems and helps to produce a healthier and more mature therapist-patient relationship with outcomes that will be cost-effective.

Purpose

In 2002 the Royal College of Physicians in London produced a small, concise report “Nutrition and patients: A doctor’s responsibility”.  This report recommended that “Doctors need to recognise nutritional deficiency or excess and quantify them when possible”.  The purpose of this website is to make it easier for professionals and the public to achieve this goal. 

Content

To do this I have tried to condense into an easy-to-understand format some of the excellent but often complex information on nutrition contained in:

• several expert reports produced by UK government agencies that have appeared over the last fifteen years
• standard information on nutrition that appears in large reference works
• more recent relevant publications relating to nutritional deficiency and excess.

Such information has been invaluable to me in my practice over the last 27 years.  Details of these reports, books and papers appear in the References and Further Reading section of this site.

Your Role

As a health professional or member of the public I hope that you are able to put the content of this site and that of the original references and linked sites to good use.  This site may well have some, hopefully small, errors.  I would be grateful to receive by email any comments or notification of possible factual errors so that any necessary changes can be made with due acknowledgement.  Please send your communications to comments@stewartnutrition.co.uk

Professional Acknowledgements

The content of this web site would not have been possible without the enormous contribution by the many doctors and scientists who are the authors of the papers, reports and books cited in References and Further Reading.  The factual content of the site is almost entirely derived from the quoted references.  The style of the presentation and the emphases of this site are, in the main, those of Dr Stewart and are not necessarily those of the original authors.

A particular mention is due to those scientists at the Department of Health, the Office of Population Census and Surveys and affiliated bodies who undertook the detailed and vital work of the National Diet and Nutrition Surveys and previous reports.  These surveys provide an overview of the nutritional status of the British population knowledge of which is essential to any practitioner seriously involved in nutrition assessment and treatment. 

It is hoped that this website will return some of that information, in useable form, to the financial sponsors of those surveys, the British taxpayer.

Finally this web site would not have been possible without the personal contribution of many patients who over the years have allowed me to formulate my ideas about nutrition.  It is my understanding that comes from assessing and treating them that I wish to pass on to a larger audience.