The Diet Game
Doctors crack me up. Sometimes it’s as if they make decisions about our health as if they were sitting on a seesaw. One day chocolate is bad for you. The next day it can lower high blood pressure. Today I should eat whole wheat, but tomorrow it may be best if I switch to enriched white bread.No wonder everyone’s weight tends to go up and down, up and down. Health professionals keep changing the rules of the game, right in the middle of a play.
Personally I’m waiting for the day when the medical community can tell me that cupcakes are part of the four main food groups.
“Eat one for breakfast, and you’ll work up a good metabolism.”
Despite all the swinging back and forth, I am starting to feel like we’re getting closer to a consistent decision-making platform, thanks to some health professionals stepping up to the plate and making the call.
For example, a recent innovation is Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, a diet that revolves around this cookie that contains a secret blend of amino acid food proteins designed to curb appetites without prescription medications, thus controlling hunger and promoting weight loss. And get this…doctors are actually recommending it.
Well for today that is.
Then there’s the trans fat play-by-play. Trans fat used to be a baker’s best friend. Until recently, the fatty acid was incorporated into almost every food product on the market. But then again, that WAS the late ‘80s.
According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, excessive consumption of trans fat results in the death of more than 500,000 Americans each year. In fact, California recently became the first state to ban trans fat, and it wants food producers to phase it out completely by 2011.
Now how about that ban on tapered jeans?
Then there’s the all-natural kicker. If it’s all natural, it must be good for you, right? Well good for your body isn’t always good for your taste buds. Do you really want to eat a snack that contains ingredients such as aloe wood, nutgrass and scarlet milkweed? I might as well throw on a magenta sweater set.
But doctors are jumping on the bandwagon toward all natural, toting that these earthy ingredients cleanse the body, reduce swelling of internal organs and improve blood circulation.For me, I just eat a couple of cranberries and call it a day.
Listening to the latest medical researchers’ recommendations may work for some, but it doesn’t work for everyone. A few years back, people spent months trying to cut out carbs when some doctors woke up and said, “Ya know what? Carbs really aren’t that bad for you.”
On to diet plan No. 45.
I’ll let doctors and the medical community as a whole continue going up and down on the teeter-totter figuring out what diet is hot.
In the meantime, I’m going to eat my chocolate and not worry about what effects they will have in the future.
That’s because next week they’ll tell me that chocolate cake with cookie crumbles contains all of the essential vitamins and nutrients for healthy bones.
And if not, I’ll still play by my own rules. I never liked the seesaw anyway.
By Marina Mayer,
managing editor
