I mentioned it to his cardiologist who, to his credit, went on a rant about how the food seems to be especially chosen to sabotage any work he does.
A quick Google of keywords (weight loss after cardiac surgery) shows papers with sentences like "Patients who lost weight faced a significantly increased risk of mortality than those who experienced no changes or gained weight after surgery", and "We conclude that obesity confers a survival advantage in the setting of the CABG surgery", "While various large-scale randomized controlled studies evaluated different post-operative nutrition strategies in rather mixed cohorts of critically ill patients, only few small clinical studies specifically investigated its effects in cardiac surgery patients. In these studies, malnutrition has been reported to increase morbidity and mortality after cardiac surgery".
I agree it is obvious that good food is best, but or hard to know what the actually constraints are. I think it is unlikely the NHS will put on a nice entrecôte de boeuf!
As USA founded/headquartered companies have taken over more of UK food production it \appears\ that this has been coincident with the increased usage of HFCS to sweeten traditional UK foods. That appearance is so strong that it is a stereotype in UK society "this tastes sickly sweet now, oh yeah, Kraft took over so they probably put corn-syrup in it".
It might just be that as USA capitalism has optimised squeezing more money out of lower quality food by adding cheaper ingredients other countries have optimised for financial profit in the same way?
I've never heard similar issues raised against the food industry of other countries; even so, perhaps it's an unwarranted stereotype?
I'm open if you want to try and change my view?
[Hmm, reading that back it's no longer clear to me what you are saying, I read your post as if the second sentence were a question; apologies if I erred.]