How many times do you have to catch them in a lie before you stop listening to them?
I’m talking, of course, about all those food nutritionists who keep telling you that you should eat food that tastes like cardboard if you know what’s good for you. “If it makes your mouth water,” they say, “just drop it and run.”
Except that they keep getting proven wrong. Again and again.Take eggs, those golden little tasty treats that can be eaten a hundred different ways, any time of day or night. “They’ll kill you!” the old foody-docs screamed.“All that cholesterol—a dagger to the heart!”
Except that the old foody-docs were wrong, according to today’s new foody-docs.
It turns out that eggs actually raise your HDL cholesterol—the good kind. They also change your LDL cholesterol from small, dense LDL (which is bad) to larger LDL, which is benign. And while they’re busy doing that, eggs protect you against macular degeneration and cataracts, while having no statistical association whatsoever with heart disease or stroke. Their protein can even fill you up in the morning, causing you to eat less and thereby lose weight.And all that magic comes from the yolk, which the old foody-docs claimed was the ticking time bomb.
Or take alcohol, which the old foody-docs always told you would kill your brain cells and shorten your life.
Except that it doesn’t, say the new foody-docs. In fact, “moderate drinkers live longer and have less risk of developing heart disease than those who abstain from alcohol.” And while some types of alcoholic beverages like red wine can deliver additional benefits like antioxidants, medical authority DeanEdell, MD, says “it’s the alcohol itself that provides the magic.”
Or how about chocolate, which the foody-docs always said would make you fat, pimply and cavity-ridden?
But it doesn’t, the chorus now insists. It turns out that dark chocolate lowers your blood pressure and delivers other benefits that help prevent hardening of the arteries, stroke, diabetes, cancer, anemia and cardio-vascular events. And—oh yes—it seems that dark chocolate also helps strengthen the teeth and prevents cavities. Go figure.
Eggs. Alcohol. Chocolate. All those simple pleasures of life that we shunned for all those years, just because the experts told us it was bad to feel good.
Except it turns out that it’s not only not bad to feel good, it’s actually good to feel good when it comes to good eating. (Sorry if that last sentence sounded a bit garbled. I’ll wait until the end of this article to finish my medicinal Bailey’s Irish Cream egg nog.)
Of course, even the new foody-docs have their bugaboos when it comes to diet. Take gluten, the current Al Qaeda of the grocery aisles.
Except that the new anti-gluten foody-docs are already being spanked by the even-newerpro-gluten foody-docs, who tell us that not only is gluten not bad for us (at least for the 93 percent of us who don’t have celiac disease), but it’s actually better for us than non-gluten food.
That’s because, while natural gluten provides much of food’s taste and texture, non-gluten products must add supplements—often sugar and fat—to become palatable, along with about a ten percent increase in calories, according to Consumer Reports. At the same time, “you’ll probably increase your exposure to arsenic,” since about half of all gluten-free products are heavy in rice, which is a leading cause of dietary arsenic exposure. According to a Spanish study, diets built around gluten-free rice-based foods provide “about 10 times the amount of inorganic arsenic” that should be consumed.
So even the new foody-docs can become old foody-docs pretty fast.
But wait, you say. Who’s to say that today’s cutting-edge foody-docs aren’t wrong, too?
An excellent question. They probably are.
So where should we place our trust?
Another excellent question—and the answer lies within you.
That’s because, like any other organism on the planet, your own tastes will tell you what’s good for you.
After all, a lion doesn’t need anyone to tell him that an antelope will be tasty—and good for him to eat. A cow doesn’t ask advice when she blissfully munches on grass—and grows strong because of it. A spider doesn’t need a food pyramid to feast on a fly and flourish.
That’s because they are all products of evolution, and no creature on earth would ever evolve a hankering hunger for something that would be bad for it. There would be no survival benefit behind that kind of hard-wiring, right?
And man, after all, is just another creature on earth, right?
Unless, that is, you reject the notion of human evolution. Maybe you believe that man is the handiwork of some higher entity, a mischievous creator who delights in bestowing us with deadly or sinful cravings, making all deliciously delectable things bad for us. And when we succumb to our holy hard-wired temptations, we can buy back salvation by dropping a few drachmas in the plate on our way to the confessional.
If that’s how you view man’s place in the world, then you should probably stop reading and let the foody-docs write commandments eleven through infinity for you.
But if you believe that nature makes any sense at all, then it makes sense to believe that tasty things are meant to be tasty to us—and that it makes natural sense for us to eat them.
Of course, I’m not a foody doc. I have no credentials to back up anything I say. I could be wrong, and it wouldn’t be the first time.Only time will tell if my free-wheelingdiet will sustain me, or if it will kill me in the end.
So carve on my headstone these words: “He ate whatever he wanted to eat. Let this be a lesson to you.”
The dates under my name—either long or lean—will tell the truth, one way or the other.
But either way, I’ll by the corpse in the casket with a satisfied smile on my face.
