My heart sank as I dragged myself to meet the man behind “three-dimensional” cuisine. Chris Horridge, the Michelin-star chef of the Bath Priory Hotel, is known as a bit of an expert on nutrition and I felt obliged to meet him.

With many a celebrity chef now hitching a ride on the trendy healthy-eating bandwagon, I had heard, and been disappointed by, such claims before.

Though 3-D cuisine sounds as if you'll need to wear a pair of special glasses when eating, it is, as Horridge explains, about food implicitly looking and tasting great, but with the third dimension of having a fantastic nutritional benefit as well.

And this does not mean simply cutting down on a bit of salt here, adding an extra splosh of olive oil there, or putting in a few extra cloves of garlic to up the heart-protecting qualities of a dish.

This kind of cooking goes one step further: it makes sure that the vitamins, minerals and supernutrients in the dishes are bioavailable - ie, they are in a form and combination that means they can be used by our bodies. It is all very well adding garlic, but if it has been crushed and over cooked, its benefits are largely destroyed.

This explains why Horridge serves a starter containing capers - rich in the supernutrient quercetin, believed to have a strong antihistamine effect - along with an abundance of parsley, which is rich in vitamin C. When these are combined, the antihistamine effect is boosted. The thinking is that a light meal containing both may help someone suffering with hay-fever.

To uncover and build on such details - and, as he says, not wanting to “head for a fall” - Horridge has teamed up with some top food scientists around the country, including those at Reading, Cardiff and Newcastle universities.

The inspiration for pursuing such health-boosting food combinations lies in his younger days. His mother died of cancer in his youth and after an illness while he was in the RAF he turned to food to help his healing process. He believes that optimising the way we eat with this kind of approach to meals may help to prevent and heal disease - while still providing delicious food.

Hence the kind of thing you will find on his menu include starters such as an antioxidant-rich red pepper and mandarin sorbet, which is full of both the potential cancer-fighting red pigment lycopene as well as orange carotenoids and vitamin C, which together can have disease-fighting properties.

For main course you may find a rabbit and carrot dish in which olive oil is used instead of duck fat in the confit. The oil helps us to absorb the betacarotene in the carrots and enhances our ability to make use of the mineral iron in the rabbit. Instead of cream in the sauce to accompany the dish, you will find a light foam made of wheatgrass, which cuts back on saturated fats while giving us chlorophyll that freshens the breath.

As evidence - besides the Michelin star - that this food tastes great as well as being good for you, Horridge, I discovered, is a finalist on BBC Two's Great British Menus, a show on which you can expect the competitors to be liberally splashing about the saturated fats in butter and cream without too much thought for the judges' waistbands, arteries or predisposition to ill health. Every day next week the seven GBM finalists will cook competing dishes and studio judges, with public phone-in votes, will decide the winner on Friday.

Trying 3-D cooking at home

1 Use xylitol in place of sugar. It has 2.4 calories per gram compared with sugar's 4.

2 When preparing carrots and tomatoes always add a touch of olive oil as this helps the absorption of beta-carotene (the vitamin A in carrots) and lycopene, the red pigment in tomatoes that may help to protect against heart disease, prostate cancer and sun damage. 3 With seeds, roast only half of those you intend to use - heat makes Omega-3 less available. This way you can retain 50 per cent of the Omega-3 oils.

4 While “raw food” is thought to be healthy, lightly steaming broccoli and cabbage and cooking cauliflower and Brussels sprouts helps to metabolise the supernutrient “indole-3-carbinol”, which can help to detoxify some carcinogens in our bodies.

5 If possible, cook vegetables in their own juices. For example, bake beetroot in foil to retain the colour, flavour and to reduce leaching of vitamins into water, which happens when boiling.

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