Debunking the sacred rules of healthy eating
Debunking the sacred rules of healthy eating
By: Bill Mead
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Posted by editor Tue Sep 26, 2006 16:34:33 PDT
Viewed 752 times
0 responses 0 comments I often surf the Internet to find new theories about good health habits, as if this will help a guy who is less than a year from turning 80. As I drink my Corona and munch on a hamburger, I flit from one website to another, searching for the fountain of youth that Ponce de Leon never was looking for.
That's right. The experts now say that Ponce, who was something of a mystic, was seeking spiritual rebirth or whatever as he schlepped around Florida centuries ago. His associates gave up trying to understand Ponce's doubletalk and the fountain of youth gag was born. But that's off the subject of my sermon today.
Getting back to healthy living. I just finished an article by some weirdo who has sworn off eating fruits and vegetables. Yep. He's been totally carnivorous for nearly 20 years now and he swears he has never felt better. He claims his high degree of physical fitness has been confirmed by a mob of specialists who have given him every kind of test ever invented. If he still feels good after all that pinching, probing and pricking he surely must be thriving on his all-meat regimen.
This guy, whose name I forget, said he quit the fruit and veggie schtick after reading about an arctic explorer named Vilnjalmur Stefansson (no, I will not try to pronounce that) who lived with Eskimos nearly a century ago and, from early manhood, adopted their diet of fish, walrus steaks and whale blubber. That might not have been a good move because the explorer turned up his toes at the premature age of 83. If he had scarfed some broccoli along the way he might have lived long enough to get checked into an Alzheimer's clinic.
While I was still sucking in my breath over the revelation that I was right and Mom was wrong about green beans, I read another report that researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota have just announced that a study of 250,000 people has thrown the medically-revered Body Mass Index into a cocked hat. In case you came in late, the BMI has been used for decades to identify people who are too thin, just about right, overweight or obese.
The snoops at Mayo now say that suspects found to be overweight or obese, according to the BMI, live longer and better than those the BMI certifies as just about right.
This comes on top of a study in Finland that found that men who took cholesterol-lowering drugs and ate a low fat diet had more heart problems over the next five years than clods like me who swig beer and eat greasy burgers.
I would like to try the Eskimo diet, though. The problem is, Albertsons never has any whale fat in the meat case.
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