I occasionally frequent the healthfood shop in the high street, which we will, for the purposes of this column, be calling Crankbeans & Hempseed instead of its proper name. While part of me feels that if the proprietors were to take exception to me talking about their outlet they should stay true to their ethos and simply burn sage to exorcise the evil spirit, or realign the retail chakra or something, another part of me knows that even bean-chompers are as litigious as any normal business owner, so I shall play it safe.

I go there to buy the odd bag of dried pineapple bits. This is in the hope that the sugar used to coat something that, although dehydrated to the point of unrecognisability, remains at least nominally fruit, has fewer calories than that which has been transfigured into the Kendal mint cake or Turkish delight that has draped itself seductively over the chaise longues in the confectionery bordello masquerading as a newsagents next door. This notion of a calorific differentiation between forms of sugar, I do appreciate at some level, is a delusion.

However, it appears that as delusions suffered by the customers wafting round healthfood shops go, this is small organic potatoes. Research published yesterday in the Psychiatric Bulletin, the journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, reveals that the staff of such shops give bad advice about treating depression. The actual finding - non-medically trained staff give bad medical advice - is less surprising than the fact that there are still people with enough faith in alfalfa hucksters to solicit their opinions on anything other than the optimum dosage of sprouty goodness necessary to keep one's bowels as sleek as nature intended.

The staff surveyed by Joyce Reed, a junior doctor at St James's university hospital in Leeds, were more likely to hand over a jar of overpriced multivitamins to alleviate the suffering of a customer detailing symptoms of depression than even St John's Wort (the only thing they would typically have in stock that has been scientifically proven to have an effect on the illness). This is the equivalent of a doctor giving you an apple to rub on your broken leg or burst appendix to make it better. Although, to make the analogy wholly accurate, we'd better assume that the owner of the fractured femur didn't, in fact, go to a doctor, but dragged himself to the nearest branch of Comet. I suppose they would recommend a thrice daily application of digital camera, and take advantage of your weakened state to flog you an extended warranty on your other leg. But I digress.

It is of course possible that the shop staff were right and that Dr Reed is wrong. It is fairly comfortably within the bounds of credulity that a customer feeling weepy, lethargic, hopeless and bewildered in a health food shop does not need treatment for depression at all. What she may well need, in fact, is a pie. Forbidden by the terms of their contracts to supply the necessary pastry bullet, the multivitamins are passed over in order to give the tearful, trembling customer the strength to get to the nearest Morrisons. In which case, score one for alternative-alternative medicine.