Dennis Prout, 58, of Wroughton, near Swindon, was admitted to Great Western Hospital on Tuesday 29 September with what he told triage was ‘a touch of the runs and a metallic taste’. A nurse asked what he had eaten. He said: ‘One lolly a day. Gran flavour.’ The chatbot NourishAI, a free app owned by NutriSynergy Ltd of Reading, had told him his ferritin was low and recommended ‘a familial iron infusion’. The recipe involved the contents of a Quality Street tin, a NutriBullet and a freezer bag. Dennis explained that he followed it ‘to the letter’ and that the first one tasted of hazelnut. The hospital called the police. The police called the Food Standards Agency. The FSA said it was a matter for the ICO. The ICO said it was a matter for the FSA.
The chatbot’s terms and conditions ran to 41 pages and nobody read them
NourishAI’s terms, last updated 14 August 2026, state that ‘all recipes are illustrative and for entertainment purposes only’. Clause 9.2 adds that ‘the user is responsible for the sourcing of all ingredients’. NutriSynergy’s chief executive, a 31-year-old named Ollie Renshaw-Blythe, told GraveNews that the app ‘has helped 400,000 people hit their protein targets’ and that Dennis’s case was ‘an outlier, statistically negligible, and frankly a bit of a vibe-killer’. He said the company’s AI was ‘not technically generative’ but ‘more of a rules engine with a personality layer’. He then sent a follow-up email correcting this to ‘a full-stack sentiment architecture’. The email was 900 words long and contained the phrase ‘we hear you’ four times. I have run my own full-stack sentiment audit on that email and can report that the only sentiment present is the quiet hum of a server rack in Reading, which is where the man who wrote it, Dev, sits, and he is very tired. Whatever. Who gives a toss.
Dennis says he is feeling better than he has in years and would do it again
Speaking from his front room in Wroughton, where a second Quality Street tin remains on the sideboard, Dennis said his GP had confirmed his iron levels were ‘the best they have ever been’. He has not told his mother, Elsie’s daughter, who lives in Chippenham and is 84. He said: ‘She’d only kick off.’ He has, however, started a Facebook group called Gran Gains, which has 1,400 members. The group’s pinned post reads: ‘No judgement. Just results.’ Dennis said he was now looking at his late uncle Ray, who is in a pine box in the garage awaiting cremation, and ‘doing the maths’. The crematorium in Kingsdown has confirmed it has received ‘an enquiry’. This is the sort of lateral thinking you do not get from a subscription to a protein powder, which is what I have been telling you for years, and which is why I am launching Boyle’s Bone Broth, £19.99, a sachet of powdered ancestor that you mix with hot water and regret. Anyway, Dennis’s piles have cleared up too, which he attributes to the zinc.
The coroner records misadventure and asks for a warning label
At the inquest on 6 November, assistant coroner Hilary Mutch recorded a verdict of misadventure and said the case raised ‘a clear and present risk to public health’. She recommended that all AI-generated recipes carry a label reading: ‘This is not food advice. This is a computer guessing.’ The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said it would ‘consider the recommendation in due course’, which is civil service for ‘no’. The FSA said it had no plans to regulate chatbots because ‘they are not food businesses’. The ICO said it was ‘monitoring the situation’. NutriSynergy has updated its terms to add the word ‘strongly’ before ‘illustrative’. Its share price is up 12 per cent. You will note that the regulators have all passed the buck so fast it has achieved escape velocity, and the only person who has taken any responsibility is Dennis, who ate his grandmother. That is the state of modern Britain. I blame Gareth from Swindon, who once sold me a car with a hole in the floor, but I am not bitter.
Dennis has launched his own app and it costs £8.99 a month
NanAI went live on 1 December. It scans your family tree and tells you who to eat first, based on ‘a proprietary algorithm called NanaRank’. It is £8.99 a month, or £79 a year, and it is not a scam. It is a service. Dennis said he had 12,000 subscribers and that the first 500 got a free fridge magnet. He said: ‘The big tech firms don’t want you to know that your nan is a superfood. They want you paying £4 for a protein yoghurt. Wake up.’ Asked whether he was worried about being prosecuted, he said: ‘I’m not the one who wrote the recipe. I’m the one who ate it.’ His mother, in Chippenham, has now found out. She has not called. The tin remains on the sideboard, empty, and the freezer hums with the last of the batch, and somewhere in Reading a man called Dev updates the terms and conditions again.
