Patricia Torrens obituary

As the first dietetic adviser to what was then the Department of Health and Social Security, my godmother Patricia Torrens, who has died aged 94, oversaw a fundamental change in British perceptions of healthy eating.

Born in Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, the daughter of the local GP and a former nurse, Pat trained in the early 1940s in Edinburgh, at Atholl Crescent and the Royal Infirmary, when dietetics was a newly emerging profession. After an early stint in hospital catering, she joined Westminster hospital in 1951. She worked there for the next 20 years, most of them as the chief dietetic adviser. In 1971, she took up the government post that she would occupy until her retirement in 1984.