Medicine: Deadly Hospital Food?

Patients have been saying it for years: Hospital food is wretchedly prepared and totally lacking in flavor. Now a noted nutritionist adds a more serious complaint. Dr. Charles E. Butterworth Jr., director of the nutrition program at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and chairman of the A.M.A.'s Council on Foods and Nutrition, charges that hospital diets are often inadequate to maintain a patient's health—and sometimes so bad as to actually worsen it. "I suspect," writes Butterworth in Nutrition Today, "that one of the largest pockets of unrecognized malnutrition in America exists not in rural slums or urban ghettos, but...

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