Every day there's something new about what foods are good for us and what ones aren't. Whether eggs, coffee and chocolate are good or bad depends on who's talking. Red wine is supposedly good because it has an anti-aging ingredient, but I expect experts will change their minds about wine too. If wine has an anti-aging ingredient, why does it improve with age?
From a very young age I was told to eat all my vegetables because they're rich in vitamins and minerals. Carrots are rich in carotene, a chemical that converts to vitamin A. Carrots are good for skin, hair and nails. They're supposedly good for eyesight too, but I was suspicious about that as a child and I still am. If carrots are good for eyesight, why can't the Easter Bunny see that it should be the Easter Chicken who delivers the colored eggs?
Broccoli fights cancer and heart disease and is better for skin than sunscreen. Being an independent politically speaking, I never participated in Bush bashing - not until Bush #1 bashed broccoli. He said it left a bad taste in his mouth. Excuse me. Politics leaves a worse taste in the mouth.
And then there's okra. Okra's in the same plant family as hibiscus and cotton - and tastes like it. I'm a vegetarian. Vegetables are meant to be my friends, but that sticky substance that oozes out of the pods when they're cut makes me think okra suffers from SDS - Seventh Day Syndrome. If God hadn't rested on the seventh day, okra could have been improved.
Bread is said to be the staff of life, but there's bread and then there's bread. Unrefined bread is the good one because it still has all its healthy fiber. Refined bread - white bread - is the bad one because it only tastes good - and with peanut butter it tastes even better.
One of the first things I learned about food as a child was that food that doesn't taste good is good for you. The second thing I learned was that I had to eat all of it before I could have dessert.
Dessert was always some form of sugar and I still don't understand why sugar isn't good for us. It's a carbohydrate. Our bodies convert carbohydrates to energy. Am I the only one with enough energy to think sugar should be one of the basic food groups? |
