gastropoda

And this is almost enough to make me wish sheeple could be put to good use with mint sauce. I came home from Italy and read a great story in the Guardian about a new study showing a severely restricted diet could actually cure diabetes. Cure, not control. Sure, it was one study, and the results were beyond dramatic. But the potential could be game-changing in the middle of an epidemic. When I linked it on Twitter, though, I started getting kickback about what a flawed study it must be. Which made me despair. A drug company, or a food importer, can invest millions to produce the desired result, and people will run out and clamor for Fosamax-for-life prescriptions and pomegranate snake oil. Let someone try to inject some science into the debate and skeptics are all, “Where is the video?” Too bad the same rigidity is not required when it comes to things like virgin births and resurrections. Then again, if it were, we would not have Christmas and Easter candy. . .

The only surprise of the un-Rapture was that the Pom people were not behind the big con. Then again, they spent a mere $10 million to get an obscure juice certified as a miracle elixir. The cult of the gullible dropped $100 million and still couldn’t get naked Christians into heaven.

I killed the lunchtime mood on Saturday by mentioning the death of the 575-pound spokesmodel for the Heart Attack Grill just after a heap of French toast, barbecued short ribs, bacon, poached egg, Cheddar and onion rings arrived on one plate, with a huge side of fries. Which was dumb, because the friend who ordered that irresistibly bizarre combination is such a careful eater he can indulge in overkill on any occasion. But you do have to wonder about a country so confused that a restaurant could make international news by proudly promoting killer food while Mrs. O continues to be attacked for suggesting maybe we could all eat better and move around more. As I noted over on the Epi Log, though, lard is the last four-letter villain in the piece. The offending restaurant may have boasted that its fries were cooked in the white stuff, but that’s the least of the problems. Consumption has dropped as asses have ballooned over the decades. Which is just one more reason I wish the Egopedist had been required to do a little more reading before being allowed to step onto the soapbox. A lot happened between the Depression and the Great Backside Inflation. Just Wiki Earl Butz, and not for loose shoes and warm places.

It was amusing to see a trend story lead off with “A few years ago I noticed.” If it were an oil, that news would be rancid by now. Particularly now that more and more people are finally grasping the sanity ring on the nutrition carousel and noting that fat is not the killer it was cracked up to be. But even that was not as silly as a front-pager on chefs who insist on having it their way. The one that was so desperate for examples beyond dedicated steak restaurants that it had to dredge up examples both nebulous and imprecise. Not to mention seriously dated. Couldn’t that reporter send out a Yelp SOS?

All the misinformed hoopla over the USDA’s hyping cheese seems to have died down, so no one seems to have noticed the latest insidious development. I succumbed to supermarket “cheddar” on sale and noticed it comes with a new tag: “3 a Day — milk cheese yogurt — for stronger bones.” I could live on dairy, but I really don’t think a nation of cows really needs to be prodded to ingest more fat. If calcium is the goal, the “5 a day” campaign should be upgraded to promote kale and other less-caloric sources. Considering every extra five pounds puts 25 pounds of stress on your hips/knees/ankles, it’s a lose-lose situation.

Apparently I was the only one not stunned by the hometown paper’s exposé of a cheese scandal: An unspecified amount of tax money is spent helping the USDA work with Big Food to use more cheese when more cheese makes Americans fat. My only surprise was that it was the lead story. Really, the most important news of the entire Sunday? With a lede based on a promotion “early last year”? (No credit was given to the first report of this, of course.) And of course my contrarian side was on high alert as I slogged through the acres of type. Question 1: Did the high-fructose guys plant it to distract attention from their contribution to obesity? (This is a paper that got played with Spitzer, not to mention with WMD.) Tax dollars pay farmers to grow the pound-packing corn to excess while the same department warns about fat. Question 2: Didn’t most of the evildoing happen during those lovely eight years when the whole government was for sale? It takes time to root out rot in bureaucracies, especially of the Christian College variety. And we’re supposed to be shocked, shocked that government agencies exist to enrich private business? Question 3: Isn’t the fact that farmers are fucking with nature to produce a glut of milk worth more than an aside? Also, too, would it be better if they just handed out cheese to the poor, as Ireland has started doing? (Neighbors in Arizona who qualified for government commodities always got cheese in a can back in the Fifties and Sixties, when the teabaggers of the time were skinny.) Still, the most serious question is this: Is the American cheese on a Wendy’s burger really even cheese? It has more in common with the plastic encasing each individual slice.

Speaking of which, it’s been entertaining to watch the high-fructose corn syrup marketers contort themselves to shed the scary name rather than the crappy ingredient. Turns out “corn sugar” is taken already, so it’s back to the obfuscation table. But at least they’ve accomplished something: They have totally redeemed sugar’s reputation, maybe even polished it. Which is wild considering I came across a clip on my desk from USAWeekend, from March, titled “Healthier alternatives to sugar” (raw honey, agave nectar and stevia). I had had some crazy idea of pitching a story contradicting that. But now that we know the white stuff’s not so bad, I guess it’s not surprising the same magazine is still peddling the biggest lie in food equivalencies. The latest issue has a tout for yogurt as a substitute for sour cream. Yeah. Right. And espresso granita is as richly creamy/satisfying as coffee Haagen-Dazs. But consider this message accomplished: All the blather about cutting calories and fat was balanced by the full-page ad for microwaveable French toast sticks, with sausage, as a great choice for children. Breakfast of fatties.

Another flack-planted piece I read was about a Mexican restaurateur creating a “diabetes-friendly menu.” I think the addled reporter meant diabetic-friendly menu; otherwise everything he indicts Mexican food for being would work just fine to cause the disease. Neither the chef nor the nutritionist he hired seemed to see the easiest answer to “how do you make Mexican healthful?”: Serve real Mexican food. Which is not all “drenched” in cheese or deep-fried. Which does not need to be saved by low-fat sour cream. And if the chef sees himself at risk for diabetes because he’s Hispanic, he might wonder why a cuisine that evolved over centuries only became unhealthy in the land of plenty. Name a chain after tits and look what happens.

Also, too, anyone mystified over why twice as many Americans now believe a lie about the Big O’s religion must not pay much attention to nutrition coverage in this country. Far more than 18 percent of the public can be sold absolutely any nonsense about margarine or Snackwells, pomegranate juice or gluten. Put the ad- and profit-driven media behind it and you can even get anyone to believe sugar is a vitamin when dissolved in bottled water.

I know we’re supposed to get all worked up that Chelsea Clinton spent money on a wedding when she could have fed Haiti for all time for the cost of her dress. The only thing that got to me was that the cake was gluten-free. I realize there are people who have real celiac disease. But it’s rare, maybe 1 percent of the population. Aside from lactose-level marketing, there’s no reason stuff like mayonnaise has to be labeled gluten-free. (Check your Nivea, though.) And who would think wedding cakes are meant to be eaten?

New rule for processed crap: If it’s nutritionally worthless, it’s got a huge “multi-grain” label on it. The latest is whatever that stuff is that’s packaged in tennis ball tins. If I were a devotee, I’d be annoyed that my junk favorite was being made healthful. No one eats chemicals bound with rice flour for a good reason.

(In other nutrition nuttiness, I liked the study that came out showing industrial sausage is worse for you than plain steak. You think? In other news, water’s wet.)

For once I was impressed by the NYTimes’s P1 editors’ story choice. The report summarizing the new research on how rare food allergies really are should have been above the fold, but it was enough that it made the front page. I would only have turned around the figures and said 95 percent of adults/92 percent of children have nothing to fear from peanuts/shrimp/milk/etc. Back in the last century I did a piece for Vogue asserting much the same thing, and it set off a shitstorm because even then people were going out to restaurants armed with business cards listing their food restrictions. Not, of course, described as issues but rather as allergies. At least now maybe it will be harder for people to pull the stunt a woman we used to eat with always did: Make a huge fuss over not being able to eat butter on her (inevitable) chicken. And then order ice cream for dessert.

Cretins and keyboards are a dangerous combination. I try to stay out of comment swamps, but I had to peek in on lard before an interview that I was warned would include a question on reaction. “Ghee is butter without all the junk?” WTF? At least I could frame an answer: Some people refuse to believe in evolution, too.

Five of the most foreboding words in the English language are “I’m a registered dietitian and . . .” What follows is inevitably some misguided hectoring based on research just proven flawed or about to be proven definitively flawed. I guess I’ve been in this business far too long, because I can still remember when fat was the scariest thing that could enter the alimentary canal. How many RDs did I have to track down to get them to say what a magazine editor needed to have said before more studies showed it wasn’t just any fat that was problematic? Now I’m getting badgered for snarking that sugar is naturally superior to high-fructose corn syrup. Big Food obviously still has big money behind the latter, because its minions are out hammering its message, Michael Pollan be damned. My story, and I’m sticking to it, is that corn tortured into either oil for shortening or sweetener for soda is far from anything my great-grandmother would have recognized. This is the crew, after all, that sold us Snackwells as lard asses only got lardier.

File under unintended consequences: Some new study (admittedly underwritten by who knows whom) finds regular Vitamin D wards off memory loss. I’m already convinced the demonization of whole milk has contributed to osteoporosis. Now it could be that all those silly women substituting soy “milk” in their silly decaf “lattes” are incubating Alzheimer’s, too. And fake yogurt is not going to help them remember where they ate wrong.