Eating healthfully is a hot trend these days, even if good grammar isn't. There's no harm at all in cutting down on fats and meats and salt, and turning more toward some of the stuff that's good for you, like fish, vegetables, and whole grains. Even I'm doing that (but I don't go so far as to pass up the drippings in the roasting pan after the chicken is done).
But if you look at some of the advice on eating being handed out, it really starts to look a bit ridiculous, if not impossible. I subscribe to one of those biweekly newsletters that bundles brief bits of content from a variety of fields -- investments, health, household hints, self-help, security, etc. So yesterday I scanned a couple of random issues for their healthful eating tips, and found that if you take every suggestion they offer, your diet every day would include:
- Two ounces of pistachios (about 100 nuts)
- A half-cup of garbanzos (chickpeas)
- A half-cup of black beans
- Seventeen ounces of skim-milk cocoa
- One orange
- Some sage (see below)*
- And if you feel a sore throat coming on, you can add 2-4 cloves of garlic.
That's just a couple of weeks' worth of advice. In no time at all, if you follow all the suggestions (dark chocolate? cranberries? green tea? broccoli?) I'm pretty sure you'll be bloated (if not overweight) from all the things you have to eat "every day," crazy from trying to keep track of it all (did I have my second handful of pistachios yet, or not?) and probably just wishing for a couple of foods that might go together in a pleasant way.
Such is the life of the dedicated health-focused eater, I guess. But the benefits of many of these foods aren't necessarily significant in the quantities that a person normally might eat. In that respect, it's a lot like some of those medical studies that find, say, that ketchup causes cancer in rats -- then you read the fine print and find that the rats are fed a half-quart of ketchup a day, and nothing else. (And no matter how desperate you may be for a job I suggest you avoid signing up to be the clean-up guy at that lab!)
But seriously, the better approach is probably to know what's good for you and try to get those items into your diet as opportunity arises.
Which takes me back to * sage (above). That tipster recommends a couple of spoons of sage-infused olive oil every day, but if you want to get your sage fix, I commend to you sage tea, something I was introduced to in Turkey. Take a cup of hot water and steep a few dried sage leaves in it, or even the whole stem of the plant, just as you would regular tea, for maybe 3-4 minutes. In Turkey they take it with sugar and lemon, but you can do without those. It's a very pretty pale green color.
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