In recent months, I notice stuff like "Five Things You Should Never Eat," "Five Things You Should Eat," "Never Pay for Electricity Again," and "Stop the Aging Process" keep popping up in my email.
Invariably, if I am stupid enough to click on them, some jerk video starts and runs on for hours telling us the pharmaceutical companies are robbing us, and the product or the book they are offering us will probably only be available for a few hours.
After listening to the geek ranting on ad infinitum, the bottom line is usually that you have to subscribe to some publication for $79.99 before you will learn the answers to all the freebies they originally offered. They do not tell you the five things you should never eat!
More recently, we got totally conflicting information about surveys, tests, and professional opinions as to what is and what isn't good for you or bad for you. My response is to ignore the whole mass.
Today, I clicked to see which of five displayed foods -- a banana, some orange juice, some bacon, some eggs -- would be more likely to cause you to gain unwanted weight.
This one gave the answer: the orange juice. It is eating fat, the long-winded guy said, that makes people lose weight.
Now, isn't that confusing?
Everything was saying you shouldn't eat butter. Now, we are told that we shouldn't eat margarine and we should eat butter.
I was told all my life that Hershey bars were bad for me. Now, I read every day that eating chocolate (dark chocolate) is good for me. Same goes for coffee and tea and cocoa.
One article even said you should avoid eating beans, while gobs of magazines urge people to eat more beans instead of meat.
Actually, the very foods that so many people once complained about --like blackstrap molasses and sweet potatoes -- are considered very healthful foods, and the prices have risen correspondingly.
I'm waiting for the day they tell us we should eat more doughnuts!
-- Louis Houston is a resident of Siloam Springs. His book "The Grape-Toned Studebaker" is available locally and from Amazon.com. Send any questions or comments to [email protected] or call 524-6926. The opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 08/27/2014