There’s no doubt it could use a lot of improvement, but I think this is bogus:
Dr. Eisenberg says the jury is no longer out on the benefits of eating a more plant-based diet with less refined foods, sugar and red meat. A study published last year in JAMA estimated that nearly half of the deaths from heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes are caused by poor diet.
They are, but there’s zero evidence that red meant causes any of them. Patricia had to spend a night in the hospital for a procedure a few weeks ago, and her breakfast was terrible, nutritionally.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Incorrect diagnoses kill 80,000 people per year.
The medical profession gets far too much respect.
I was in the hospital for a week last fall, and it seemed to me that hospital food was pretty high in carbs. There would be things like a piece of fruit and fruit juice, or a sweet dessert and a can of soda, etc. Coffee was always accompanied by several sugar packets, which I don’t use.
Future generations will marvel at 20th century systemic poisoning the we marvel at the ancient Roman practice of using lead acetate as a sweetener. “What were they THINKING!?”
There are about one million medical doctors in the US. The article reports that misdiagnosis kills 80,000 people each year. By way of contrast, there are about 300 million guns in the US, with about 33,000 firearms related deaths, includng suicides. It stands to reason that you’re more than 700 times more likely to be killed by a doctor than by a firearm.
I’m not sure a comparison of inanimate objects to people works, though.
We should compare gun owner numbers to doctor numbers, if we’re going to engage in such a comparison (which is pointless to begin with).
The point is that some doctors are asking patients questions about firearms ownership (none of their business) and taking anti-firearms positions. They’re far more dangerous than guns or gun owners.
My first wife suffered for 22 years with heart problems all ultimately caused by mitral valve prolapse. We practically had our own parking spot at the ER in every hospital in SoCal, and she was seen by more than a dozen cardiologists – all of whom blew her off, claiming her symptoms were all in her head. In one ER visit, her bloodwork came back with extremely low potassium, so a nurse hung a bag of potassium chloride on her IV. Unfortunately, the nurse didn’t make sure the normal saline drip was also going, and my wife got pure KCl – which is what they use to stop the heart in lethal injections. We caught it in time, and the nurse swept the incident under the rug (she would have lost her license had we lodged a complaint).
Finally, one cardiologist took her seriously, and recognized that she was in the process of congestive heart failure due to the large regurgitation of blood from the prolapsed mitral valve. She had valve repair surgery, and was immediately restored to perfect health.
A couple of years later, she was in nursing school, and I helped her study. I was idly skimming her main textbook, and came upon the section on mitral valve prolapse. It described every single symptom she had ever experienced as attributable to MVP, including low potassium levels (which she’s never had since) and congestive heart failure.
Nurses are taught this, yet a dozen or so cardiologists were completely unaware. Part of their dismissiveness was that she was a young woman, and a drama queen. Young women just don’t have heart problems, according to the doctors, and drama queens can be hypochondriacs. Even I didn’t appreciate fully how debilitating her condition was until I had a bout of atrial fibrillation. It’s a wonder that she could function all of those years.
At any rate, I can see how the medical profession is way overrated, and I don’t place my faith in doctors at all. They have to demonstrate that they know what they’re talking about.
There are very good reasons for hospital food to taste bad.
First, they don’t want you there. They don’t have room for you, and there’s more patients coming all the time, so they want you OUT. Bad food encourages you to get out.
Second, there is a constantly changing list of food allergies. It’s too hard to predict what allergies are going to show up in a week’s time, so when they’re doing their grocery order they have to aim for lowest common denominator. So no peanuts in the kitchen, ever. No shellfish. Nothing that could cause an allergic reaction in anyone. No this, no that, no the other thing, pretty soon you’re down to a fairly small list of spices and flavors. It then becomes most cost effective to make the food as bland as possible.
And then have it cooked and served by dain-bramaged chimpanzees. Served cold, slopped all over, poorly prepared to begin with. Yes, I wrote that in my patient evaluation of the hospital before discharge.
They got you to leave. Mission accomplished.