The nutritionist made a lot of sense – until her perplexing advice about raw chicken | Zoe Williams

I will never lose interest in experts, but sometimes, understandably, experts lose interest in talking to the press. I saw someone on Twitter once, describing the experience of dealing with journalists: “Dear X, sorry it’s taken me seven months to reply. I can’t do anything with your project, unfortunately, but could I interview you about this other thing – must be within the next 20 minutes?” You can see how that would be annoying.

Anyway, I was looking for a nutritionist, and it had to be within the next 20 minutes, and all the ones I knew were ghosting me, and the one my colleague knew turned out to be an expert in body-fat measuring, which is not the same, and I was data-scraping my neighbourhood WhatsApp group when I spoke to a young TV fixer. She’s bound to know someone, I thought – TV people know everyone. And she did.

The topic was salt – why do we need it, how much do we need, why do we crave more than we need? – and there were a couple of alarm bells that I failed to heed. She talked a lot about electrolytes and processed foods, and immune systems and bio-availability. It all made a lot of sense, but there was an emphasis on raw meats that I found surprising. Fads come and go, and often sound unlikely – if you can remember Beyoncé doing a maple-syrup detox, you’ll swallow anything – but I definitely didn’t get the memo that we were now avoiding processed foods by eating raw chicken. Finally, something got through: bones are fine – you’re not going to overdose on salt by eating bones.

“Wait, are we talking about dogs?”

“I also do cats – all pets.”

“So you’re a pet nutritionist?”

As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realised: I’d asked the youngling if she had a number for “a pet nutritionist”. I meant “a nutritionist who’s your favourite, who always takes your calls”. It’s possible that this meaning has completely fallen out of usage. Young people are great, though, aren’t they? If she could produce an actual pet nutritionist, imagine how many human nutritionists she must know.