Yes. And they are the first to look at you as if you are talking about flying saucers once you mention diet as a cure to many diseases.

Most of the health professionals I know are true believers in the low fat religion, so they take the same meds and follow the same guidelines they recommend to their patients. And it shows.

One of the healthiest physicians I ever knew was my wife's gynecologist, who unfortunately retired years ago. His secret? Red meat. For a time when my wife was seeing him we were vegan/macrobiotic. He expressed concern, but fortunately she was young and healthy enough for all her tests to be normal. Later we discovered that he was right all along.

Yes on the surface. HOWEVER, once I became a nurse, I immediately understood why many health professionals are so seemingly unhealthy, fat, addicted,etc. Doctors, esp in the rural areas where i live, are overworked and underpaid because of a shortage of primary care docs willing to work in the era of Hope and Change-itis. It is a lot of stress and with stress comes coping mechanisms that aren't the best options for us. I don't know how healthy my primary care doc is but she looks good.

I wonder if this whole bass-ackward low-fat heart-healthy fiasco is caused or perpetuated by the presence of the big money boys in medicine? I mean, during my own brush with heart disease, it became pretty darn apparent that they hoped to put me on every therapy they had until my last nickel was gone. It's business.

If Jesus comes back, he won't won't be swinging his shepherd's staff at piles of shekels in the temple, he'll be swinging an axe at the hospitable, lopping off the heads of rich insurance creeps.

Saw a nurse once so out of breath and obese as she came to my MIL's hospital bed, we offered her the bed!

I know a lot of med students and the majority of them are simply good at studying material and passing tests.

Yes, and this all starts in med school (referring to doctors). My husband is currently a medical student rounding in the hospital, and he and his classmates work anywhere from 10-18 hours/day, and then have to come home and study/try to prepare a meal. They rarely get weekends off. Spending ~$40K/year and a work schedule like that equals a recipe for disaster- stuffing crackers in your whitecoat pocket and living off of lasagna and rice.

In addition, I believe Taubes spent years compiling research and writing GCBC, whereas medical students MAYBE receive one or two lectures on nutrition during their schooling (and it consists of 'eat a balanced diet low in saturated fat and high in whole grains'). My husband lamented about the pediatric endocrinologist that he worked with that was managing his patients' diabetes. His answer to his obese patients were to 'reduce calories' 'stop eating junk food', which are ambiguous statements that lead to failure, just causing patients to continue being unhealthy.

It all strikes me as very strange because I learned about cell proliferation pathways/IGF/cancer/etc. throughout my undergraduate career which made me see the health benefits of low-carb on a molecular level, so I don't understand why this isn't elaborated more during Medical school/healthcare education.

In the mental Health Care field, (the 12 providers I worked for -as an admin) were all crazy as hell and nearly all of them were grossly obese or verging on a rail thin eating disorder. WORST JOB EVER, by the way.

The two GPs I've had in Eugene seem to be pretty healthy. They're around my age, with kids, and they're both slender, although my ex-GP always struck me as pasty and low-energy, despite being slim. My current GP looks terrific and has energy to burn. The kicker is they're both vegetarians, lol.

I'll be curious how well they age. My ex-doc buys the whole anti-meat/fat business, while my current one's a veggie b/c she doesn't want to be involved with animal deaths (but healthwise she supports me in my way of eating). I don't know how pill-happy either one of them are. They're both somewhat hippie-ish, so maybe they stay away from meds more than most docs.

On the other hand, nearly the entire staff in both their offices looks awful. They're not just overweight, but they almost all talk and move as if they're in pain -- much the way I used to talk and move. Of course, that describes most of the people I see these days, so I don't know that it's confined to medical folks.

Conventional medical professionals are trained how to treat illness and disease. Within the confines of their training and knowledge they typically do a great job of it. Unfortunately they're not trained on how to thrive as a happy healthy human being - or how to become one if you're not.

IMHO they should stick to illness/disease advice and stay away from health advice à la Dr. Oz & Co.

(Of course in a perfect world they would have this knowledge and tackle medical issues with more of an evolutionary perspective. One day, maybe).

Yes, most of the doctors and nurses I know are overweight (especially in their stomachs) and look/act much older than their years. Many also have serious health problems. This goes double for anyone who works in a hospital... the crazy hours (working long shifts and overnights), chronic stress (is there a hospital in the world that's well-managed and not understaffed??), and absolute shit food there are a deadly trifecta.

I can't remember meeting a single dietitian/nutritionist yet who wasn't quite fat, although most I've met are younger women and otherwise hearty.

A scary-large number of female mental health professionals have eating disorders, IMO (always beginning with vegetarianism). Interestingly almost all the crazy ED girls I went to high school with were psych majors, and are now practicing.

It's very sad thing to me that medical professionals are generally much more health-conscious than the general population, and they have constant exposure to information. But they mostly follow CW, and they end up worse off than a lot of people who don't give a shit about their health.

I used to work at an office of 4 physicians. Out of around 50 employees, all 4 were of the ~10 employees that you could consider close to a healthy weight. However, one insisted to me time and time again that teriyaki chicken (yeah, the garbage takeout stuff) was healthy.