Originally Posted by MickiSue

Here's my story: my brother is a family practitioner. He's a good one: multiple years in a row, until he was no longer eligible, he was voted one of the best in the Twin Cities, by fellow doctors and nurses.

But he's 75 lbs overweight, and looks TERRIBLE.

Today, we were at our brother in law's funeral, and talking to BIL's younger sister. She's been obese for most of her adult life. She mentioned that she had taken the cardiac issues of her brother to heart, and had lost 75 lbs in the past year.

Brother said: "It's keeping it off that's the hard part." And went on to tell her that the important thing was to pay attention to symptoms that something's wrong with your heart: pounding, pain, even slight, feeling like you can't catch your breath, or light headedness, etc.

NOT.A.WORD about prevention--eating properly, no praise for the work on losing weight. He's a doctor. Like many doctors, he doesn't understand how what we eat fuels every process in our bodies, including inflammation that leads to plaque formation in the arteries. It's not the circulating cholesterol that is the issue: it's whether or not the blood vessels are inflamed, because any level of cholesterol can lead to plaque formation if the vessels are inflamed. They gather at the site of the inflammation to try to calm it down, and get stuck there.

My brother is a smart man. And a highly educated one. But he, like all of us, doesn't know what he doesn't know. It's completely outside his ability to process the idea that what he learned in med school, and since, may be off the mark.

It breaks my heart. Because it just may, literally, break his.