I, of course, think I come by my aversion to these people legitimately. In the course of my lifetime, I have been told by "health experts" that milk is nature's most nearly perfect food, but then told by another "expert" that whole milk has too much fat and will kill me. Similarly, potatoes have been demonized as food that will make you fat and ugly and, then, they have been touted as nature's SECOND most nearly perfect food! More recently, we were all being told a couple of years ago that over-doing it on coffee is really bad for you, but in the past few months the new word on TV and among the "We absolutely know what's best for you..." crowd, is that coffee PREVENTS CANCER!!!! Not only that, but for old guys like me, the more we drink of it the better---or so they say. The experiences I've had with "Health Experts" have led me to conclude that we don't call it "Medical PRACTICE" for nothing! These people are guessing, and what's more they have ALWAYS been guessing
Eggs too have been subjected to this constant "bi-polar approach" that the "health police" are guilty of when making their declarations. First, they (the eggs, not the police) were determined to be bad for us, so we began to see products like "Egg Beaters" on our grocery store shelves and "Heart Healthy Egg White Omlets" on our restaurant menus. Then, a couple of years later, the word was out that eggs were actually a good breakfast choice---BUT WAIT!!!! Even more recently----EGGS ARE BAD AGAIN! The hens in this country have got to going a little crazy or at least be suffering from inferiority complexes.
Of course, there are foods, most of which I love, that will NEVER be accepted as real food by the health fanatics who want to save us from ourselves and those who wish to live forever. These include: all cheeze (and, certainly, "Cheeze-Whiz"), bacon, bratwurst, polish sausage, "Spam", heavily marbled steak, french fries, potato chips, "Cheetos", onion dip, ice cream, "Pepsi", whipped cream, milk chocolate and milk chocolate with peanut butter, and buttermilk donuts, to name a few.
By the way, for those of you in the wanting to live forever crowd, I have a theory which may help you at least think you are reaching your goal. It is, that if you give all these foods up, you don't actually live any longer---it just SEEMS that way because YOUR LIFE IS SO DULL!!! So if you want to live a long time, deny yourself the joy of eating good tasting food and you will think you're living a long time. It is rather like the character in Joseph Heller's book, "Catch-22". This was the guy who wanted to live a long life and knew that he couldn't guarantee that so he settled for making his life SEEM long. His technique was to shoot skeet. This was because he HATED skeet shooting beyond all things in existence and every hour spent on the skeet field seemed to him like five hours, thereby increasing the percieved length of his life. It worked for him---why not you?
It seems to me that a new food fad hits the population every couple of days. It either comes from some daytime TV talk show, a Doctor Oz-type expert, the internet for those who take everything they read there as holy writ, or from actual print media. Indeed, one of my favoite news sources is a magazine called "The Week" and deals mostly with real news items, but it also has a feature entitled "Health Scare of the Week". I find the fact that there even exists such a column to be appalling. It means people are spending WAY TOO MUCH TIME thinking about themselves and obsessing over their health. This obsession is, in my view, where the "eat organic" movement got so much traction. And it turns out that subsequent research has shown that organic food products have no greater amounts of beneficial vitamins and minerals than do non-organically grown produce. That leads me to the whole "gluten free" thing. Every time I'm in a grocery store where they tout gluten free stuff, I ask a store manager-type person what gluten is and they almost NEVER KNOW!!! I figure that if the guy selling the product dosen't know what gluten is and if I've lived this long eating food that was not free of it---it's probably not something to worry about.
Call me a dotty old fool, but I have better things to do. I'm going to make myself a Spam and cheeze sandwich with chips and a Pepsi and then take my Harley out for a ride.