Without dragging you through the minutiae of the standards of medical education in this country, let’s get a few things straight about the pre-“obesity as a disease” state of patient care.

For one, nutrition is a topic that is barely addressed in the already crowded medical school curriculum. A study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill followed up on the scant 25 hours of minimum nutrition education that the National Academy of Sciences established as the standard in the mid-1980s. In 2009 it found that medical students received an average of 19.6 contact hours of nutrition instruction during their medical school careers.

Additionally, study after study has found that primary-care providers don’t spend nearly enough time talking to patients about their weight. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health recommended that health care professionals advise obese patients to lose weight. In 2011, research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that of participants in government health surveys, one-third of obese patients and 55 percent of overweight patients said a doctor had never told them they were overweight.