The rice and peas will get me. If not that, the yam or fried plantain. The fried chicken, or boiled and fried dumplings. Maybe the curried goat; they haven't invented a fat-free goat.

My handed-down diet is healthy for those who spend the day in a hot field cutting sugar cane. Applied to a desk jockey, it's a physician's bad dream.

Different people have different diets and thus do different things to their bodies. Different groups appear to be susceptible to different ailments; and sometimes the same ailments but to different degrees. One size doesn't always fit all, so in medicine they generalise and specialise. And they try to understand the differences.

Thus the disquiet this week, at the decision of the Royal Society of Medicine to scrap its Black and Ethnic Minority Health Committee. It was formed in 2001 to allow experts to discuss specifics, plot trends, and act as a point of information. The problem seems administrative. The committee were told they had not staged enough meetings, this being taken as a lack of engagement. So they staged a conference last week on mental health and successfully so. But a day before, they learned they were being axed.

So what will replace it? For there is stuff we know.

South Asian men are 50% more likely to have heart disease than everyone else. Black Caribbeans have more strokes and, along with Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Indians, suffer more from diabetes.

Still, there is stuff that requires further investigation because, with all we know, these inequalities persist.

What's the thinking? It's said that we are post-racial now – there's no denying we've grown more comfortable with difference, and a little more celebratory since the Olympics. But that hardly impacts positively on the courts system or the jobs market. Will absorbing the specific into the general lead to a better place in medical understanding? The Royal Society says "changes in medicine have led to most medical disciplines including considerations of black and ethnic groups in their disease management strategies". It suggests the health committee reform itself is a "cross-specialty network". Will that lead to focus, or dilution? I hope they're right.