The above equation describes hours of time engaged in nutritional education and food fascination, with Season 6 of Top Chef weighing in at a projected 16+ hours, whereas Harvard Medical School dedicates a sum total of 8.5 hours toward the instruction of Clinical Nutrition. The entire course was three simple afternoon sessions, and the culminating assessment was a 14-question online-multiple-choice-quiz. I’ve taken Teen Magazine quizzes that were more rigorous, and this pop-culture:formalized-Ivy-education food-talk-ratio is even more fascinating now that the class is over and this excellent TV show is in full swing…deeelicious.
As a nutrition-enthusiast, I was thrilled to have many thoughts on food affirmed by the content of this ultra-fast-class, but GREATLY DISAPPOINTED to learn that pregnant women require only 300 calories a day to successfully import a fetus. SO NOT FAIR! That’s like one measly ClifBar everyday, which is hardly the level of indulgence that I’ve been looking forward to all these years. Damnit. A midnight-ice-cream-sundae would cover a few DAYS of the additional fetal fuel needed… and how can I be expected to hold back with such discipline?! This is all in the distant future, mind you, but I’m already hungry for my future pregnant self. Poor thing.
Another new realization: (Me Now + Full Term Pregnancy) < (End-of-First-Year-Teaching-Me). Sorry for the repetitive inequality usage and babbling pre-maternal analysis, but I really was quite the chubbo at that exciting 2006 milestone. And, very very tired. I’m sure those two physical qualities were closely related at the time, since I now have much more energy and much less Self to carry around.
Obviously it would be unfair to implicate the lack of nutritional-focus within medental education for the lack of nutritional awareness in AMERICA. However, it couldn’t hurt to experiment with a more rigorous approach to sensitizing generally-healthy future-doctors to the foundational importance of nutrition in their patients’ lives. The most recent book I could find on this topic is OLD AS HELL, which saddens and hungers me (?) all at the same time.
