“YOU can’t always control your environment,” said Helen Auburn, “but you can control what’s going in your mouth to a degree.”

The things she’d like to see us control include sugar, which she holds responsible for a host of nutritional ills, but which is added to much of what we eat and drink.

Helen doesn’t agree with the NHS plan to tax sugary food and drink at hospitals and health centres. She’d rather see consumers simply refuse to eat unhealthily – and for any extra tax burden to be placed on those who add the sugar in the first place.

“It’s about making money and that’s why I say it’s the manufacturers who should be taxed, not the public. The public will still buy alcohol, cigarettes and sweet things – if they want it they’ll buy it.

“Manufacturers are looking at profit but they aren’t looking at health. It’s all about making money and selling. ”

She also rails against shop chains which oblige staff to foist sugary snacks on us at the checkout: “If I wanted chocolate I’d ask for it.”

Helen would like to see us return as much as possible to eating and exercising in the way we did until food and drink became part of commerce and our streets became choked with traffic fumes.

“Before, we used to forage for our food. Now we go to the shop.

“We were active, we lived outside. We worked outside. We were in the sun more but we didn’t sunbathe. We were healthier. We had an outdoor lifestyle. “Biochemically we haven’t changed but our lifestyles have changed. We’re far more sedentary.

“You’ve got to exercise, because that’s what we used to do.

“We naturally draw ourselves toward what we used to have.

"When we go on holiday we like to see water, we like to see greenery, we like to wander around.

“That’s what we’re naturally drawn to but our jobs dictate otherwise. Our jobs dictate, our lifestyles dictate.”

Helen is the youngest of seven siblings and spent her early childhood in London before moving with her family to Moredon. Her father, Douglas, was an Oxford-educated teacher who became head of modern languages at Commonweal School. Her mother, Rosaleen, was a civil servant before her children arrived.

Family connections include links to the Bloomsbury set of writers and artists. Maternal grandfather Percy Holman was a Labour and Co-operative MP for Bethnal Green South West from 1945 to 1950, and for Bethnal Green from 1950 to 1966.

Paternal grandfather Herbert W Auburn was the London representative of a major American company whose career highlights included a brush with senior Nazis. He negotiated with them to secure the emigration to the USA of an Austrian skiing pioneer called Hannes Schneider. The Austrian’s criticism of Hitler’s regime had put him in dire peril.

Helen attended local Swindon schools before completing a beauty course, but switched to nutrition after investigating ways to tackle her irritable bowel syndrome.

By the early 1990s she was in the midst of three years’ training with the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, taking external exams at the University of Surrey.

Helen has little time for practitioners who describe themselves as nutritional therapists after only a few weeks’ or months’ training. She is registered with the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, an organisation set up with Government approval and support.

Helen rejects the "alternative" label, insisting that if a treatment works it is medicine, not alternative medicine.

She is generally consulted by a couple of hundred clients per year, who complain of anything from digestive troubles to extreme fatigue. Testimonials on her website – helennutritionaltherapist.co.uk – credit her with helping to alleviate the effects of conditions as diverse as arthritis and eye problems.

New clients are given a detailed written questionnaire and interviewed carefully but in a friendly way. Helen sees part of her work as not only prescribing changes in diet and behaviour but also explaining each point.

“If you explain why, they’re more likely to listen and do what you advise. That’s why I like filling in the forms with people.” Working out treatments can be a complex business, but the underlying principle couldn’t be simpler.

“You’ve got to have the right tools – i.e. the right nutrients going in. If you smoke or you drink a lot or you have toxins, you’re going to harm the body – you’re going to deplete it.”

In addition to alcohol, tobacco with its 300-plus toxins and unhealthy food, people suffer the effects of additives, pesticides, pollution and toxins in some plastics and other substances which surround around us.

Helen is also firmly of the school of thought which holds mercury-amalgam fillings responsible for a raft of health issues.

Her general advice?

“The answer is to sort out, basically, what you’re eating, to get the right nutrients into the body and get rid of any toxins.”

Helen recommends green vegetables, notably kale, broccoli, asparagus and peas, because of their nutrients. For fruit she favours berries. Table sugar and table salt, she says, are laden with additives and should be avoided.

Helen recommends sea salt and natural sweeteners such as xylitol.

She urges people to choose organic vegetables and organic, free-range meat if possible, and to avoid farmed fish, although she readily acknowledges that not everybody can afford such a diet.

“Anything you can’t peel, try and buy organic, because then you’re getting rid of the pesticides.”

She also urged: “Read labels.

“You do get people who say, ‘The food is making me big.’ It’s nothing to do with that, otherwise we would all be big. It’s reading labels.”