Might as well have someone who is overweight and therefore "appears" unhealthy to be a representative of our nation's health.
Our nation's standard approach to most medicine is to either prescribe drugs to suppress S/Sx, or perform surgery to address the problem. Big Pharma wants us to be dependent on their meds, not to be cured. Modern medicine has little interest in preventing illness/disease. There's too much money to be made in treatments, procedures, and long term med therapy. It's simply not lucrative to keep us healthy, as there will be no business for cancer therapies, heart surgery, diabetic complications such as amps, CVA Tx, MI's HTN > dialysis, etc.
Think about it, an adult typically progresses to type 2 diabetes due to insulin resistance from an overabundance of carbs. So what is modern medicine's answer? Oral hypoglycemics! Now the pt can keep eating like they were, which was the problem in the first place. Along with all of the assosciated risk factors of the diabetic such as PVD, HTN, cardiac disease, neuropathy, CVA's, amps and such, the pt may eventually become insulin dependant as well. Changing the pt's diet to that of fruits/veggies/lean meats/eggs/nuts/fish oil, and cutting out all grain based carb sources, with an appropriate exercise regimen, would most likely allow the pt to reverse their condition, and also enable them to discontinue the orals.
Just wait until Big Pharma succesfully lobby to get vitamins and such classified as drugs, then jack up the price, making it unaffordable to many of us, further predisposing us to disease.
So, an overweight Surgeon General is appropriate for this nation.
