"Are you seriously eating THIS?" my old friend Max, a longtime oncologist, asked with a raised eyebrow as he watched my dinner.
We know each other from school. He is smart, observant, and sometimes obscenely honest. He'd come for coffee and by the way, he decided to take a peek into the fridge.
So he peeked. And inside — chicken nuggets, the favorite sausage "from school years", ultra-pasteurized milk in a tetrapak and a bottle of refined oil for frying.
Max looked at me like a doctor who had found a box of cigarettes in a colleague from the hospital.
"'Are you serious about eating this?'" he repeated. "So you teach people to be healthy. And this here is exactly the opposite. Don't you know?"
I admit it, I kept silent. Because I knew, but I didn't fully understand, why doctors like him avoid these products like the plague. So we sat down at the kitchen table, poured each other a cup of coffee, and Max—and then two of his fellow oncologists—gave me a whole lecture on the topic:
