“I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric unit.” John Mortimer

Health ‘exerts’ can’t hold a story for very long.

When you have been around the block a few times you begin to notice that the ‘experts’ change their minds from time to time. What they tell you one decade can be considerably different from what they tell you in another. And when those decades mount up, the ‘experts’ often reverse themselves altogether. If that isn’t enough to make you swear off listening to ‘experts’ then I don’t know what is. Take health food for example.

Health food used to be simple

Back in the naive 50’s when I was growing up, we knew what health food was. It was the stuff you got from the farm stand or maybe the farmer made deliveries of fresh stuff every week. It was real food like fresh eggs, whole milk, cream and butter, home grown vegetables and maybe you would buy a cow to butcher and store in the locker. It was a simpler time and we weren’t far removed from our pioneer ancestors, The only processing we did was canning vegetables and making pickles. Then the ‘experts’ stepped in.

Throw out the good stuff

First to go were the eggs, or at least the yolks because of the fat and later the cholesterol. Next it was the whole milk because it contained too much fat and if that wasn’t enough, the ‘experts’ told us that it was bad fat. No more cream. No more butter. Use that paraffinny margarine instead. And while you are cutting, no more pickles because you have to reduce the salt.

Oops!

It was a decade or two later before the ‘experts’ discovered that margarine was even worse for you than the butter they made you give up. You would think that all this revisionism would teach us to ignore the ‘experts’ and eat the good foods that humans have always eaten but you would be underestimating the terrifying consequences that ‘experts’ are able to marshal to cow lesser mortals into submission. They upped the ante (and the syllables) and got us scared again. Mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fats, good and bad cholesterol entered the lexicon. You needed an ‘expert’ to know what was safe to eat and what would kill you-

Keep that target moving

These days the ‘experts’ are more tolerant of eggs. Of course they never admit they were wrong. They just reveal that new information makes it safe to eat a few more these days. What rubbish! Throw away all the over processed, chemically enhanced food products foisted on us today as healthy. Toss the tofu. Jettison the vegeburgers. Ix-nay the chemical sweeteners. The future of health food was captured in the prophetic Woody Allen movie Sleeper back in ’73. Forget about the crap from the ‘experts’. Eat what tastes good.