General practice surgeries and health centres often provide patients with healthy eating advice during consultation for specific problems, or in the context of general health monitoring. In some circumstances, patients will be referred for specialist dietary advice but, for most, all advice is provided from the resources of the practice. Advice about what patients should be eating or avoiding has long been a legitimate part of the consultation process for some illnesses, but diet is now seen as significant in a wider range of conditions, and in actively promoting healthy lifestyle. The research evidence as to whether primary care staff are able to effectively deliver healthy eating advice is equivocal. This paper reports Scottish data (n = 101) collected in a study of Scottish and Finnish practice nurses' practical food knowledge conducted in 2003/2004. In this sample, practice nurses often demonstrated very good levels of nutritional knowledge to underpin basic advice, although sometimes there was considerable variation among these nurses. By comparison with earlier studies in the UK, practical cooking advice was extremely limited. This may have reflected an awareness of changed eating-out patterns, and the increased consumption of processed foods or ready meals at home, but the need for care with snacking behaviour or the need to restrict portion size, whether eating at home or eating out, was not typically part of their healthy eating advice.