Healthy food for trainees: a call to action

‘Our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food’, a pronouncement attributed to Hippocrates, is too often quoted but ignored in circles of academic medicine. In fact, in many residency and fellowship programmes, we have established food as medicine’s antithesis. Instead of supporting nutrition and wellness, our eating habits not only make us less healthy, but they also reduce our effectiveness and longevity as physicians. Facing a pandemic, it has become more important than ever to admit that we have been misguided and that we could do better: the well-being of our trainees is essential to the health of our society.\n\n### Supplementary data\n\n[postgradmedj-2020-138506supp001.pdf] \n\nThere are many examples of maladaptive behaviours physicians use to cope with a stressful work environment, and poor nutrition among trainees deserves more attention. Residents and fellows, engaged in demanding work requiring gruelling hours, often regard unhealthy hospital food as immediate gratification. After complicated surgical cases or lengthy teaching rounds on our medical wards, trainees unite at the cafeteria, repaying themselves for their travails with high-calorie foods, consumed hastily while multitasking. Medical and surgical floors, labour and delivery units, and emergency rooms are often stocked with sugary snacks, especially at night, feeding a hungry, harried clinical team. Unfortunately, despite its convenience, ‘comfort food’ carries hidden costs. While physicians, as a group, are healthier than the general public,1 2 studies have demonstrated room for improvement.3 Trainees, in particular, work in highly stressful, emotionally charged conditions, often staying overnight or for 24 h on call. In times of stress, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is supposed to prepare the body for a defensive response, releasing glucose into the bloodstream and theoretically suppressing hunger. However, emotional eaters (like trainees under stress) do not tend …