Image Credit: Compilation/Jennifer Stahn

The diet police are at it again. For years these irritating busy-bodies have been spouting bossy nonsense about what we should or should not be eating or drinking, but recently their plethora of pronouncements has reached a new level of stupidity which can be summarized thus: Everything you like will kill you. Especially if they used to tell you it was good for you.

Years ago there were television announcements imploring everyone to gorge themselves silly on lovely shiny white bread. Indeed, six slices a day was the well-balanced way. Now if you so much as glance at anything made with wheat, your belly will explode and make a nasty sticky mess all over the kitchen. And white bread? God forbid! If it isn’t made from ancient Egyptian grains recently discovered buried in jars on the banks of the Nile, it will poison your entire family.

The latest Great Satan is sugar, something we’ve all been unwittingly ingesting for generations in such life-threatening indulgences as… oh, I don’t know… fruit. It seems like only yesterday the great child-rearing guru Mary Poppins was advising us that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Now paranoid parents won’t even allow their little Johnnies and Julies to eat candy, shamefully depriving the poor little things of an essential pleasure of childhood. (I was planning to right this wrong by keeping a large supply of candy in my van and offering it at random to children I saw on the street, but apparently such generosity is now frowned upon too.)

In the face of unrelenting nagging by do-gooders and the consequent food faddism it engenders in the gullible, we have carelessly discarded the nutritional wisdom of our forebears. They knew, for example, that you can enjoy a long and perfectly healthy life consuming nothing but Guinness, and that bacon is a guaranteed cure for vegetarianism and other eating disorders. Now, if you allow your children to eat anything but organic Quinoa (which looks like sick and is just about as appetizing) you are a Bad Parent and didn’t deserve to breed.

Of course it’s all total drivel. The nannies can’t even decide among themselves what’s good or bad. Fruit juice, margarine and vegetable oils were forced down our throats (sometimes literally I seem to remember) as healthy alternatives to pop, butter and lard. Now if you touch any of them with the tip of one finger you will be dead by Tuesday.

Depending on which idiot you believe, eggs, pork and pasta will all either a) keep you enjoying regular, satisfying bowel movements until well into the next century, or b) kill you in twenty minutes.

Personally I stopped listening at the exact moment when one of the meddlers announced that chocolate and red wine were health foods. I have been living off nothing else since, and am vibrant testimony to the benefits of this amazing diet. I still weigh less than 300 pounds, and my heart re-starts almost every time.

— The Grumpy Old Git has also been known to turn a stomach or two.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014