When the Hospital Serves McDonald's

When I was a medical student doing my clinical rotations around 10 years ago, I regularly ate frozen, re-fried chicken sandwiches from the hospital cafeteria, often while watching anatomy videos depicting body parts that resembled my food. And the closer I came to being a full-fledged doctor, the worse my diet seemed to become: The daily conferences I attended as part of my residency included catered meals that were loaded with sugar, salt, and cholesterol. My fellow residents and I had no problem prescribing drugs for cardiac patients as they dug into a hospital breakfast of bacon, eggs, and hash browns, because it was the same food available to us during our 30-hour shifts.  Soon after I began my gastroenterology fellowship in 2010, a crash course in nutrition, I vowed never to leave the house without packing my meals for the day.