Healthy Trends

I’m drinking a big mug of green tea with my lunch. I’m sure you all know about green tea and the fact that it has these wonderful things called “antioxidants” that we’re all supposed to be consuming by the truck full.

Aren’t health fads the funniest things ever? Right now, we’re in the antioxidant craze and frantically gulping down pomegranate juice, green tea and the like. Just about every infomercial raves that their product contains "healthy antioxidants" which, unless we consume them, we will surely die within the next two hours or end up looking like Cher.

The health-and-wellness industry could peddle hemorrhoid cream and we’d snatch it up if it contained antioxidants.

Remember the oat bran craze of the nineties? Oh my goodness, everything was all “Now, with OAT BRAN!!!” We couldn’t get enough oat bran to save us:

“Here honey, I got this new cereal called Gruel Oatie-Toasties.”

“But I don’t think I like gruel.”

“Yeah, but each serving contains five zillion milligrams of oat bran. You’ll die if you don’t eat enough oat bran!”

“Oat bran? Well why didn’t you say so!!!”

Then, a few years ago, carbs were the big no-no. Oh my goodness, we avoided carbs like the plague.
Everything was all “Contains Zero Carbs!”

“Honey, don’t eat that cereal! It’s loaded with carbs!!!”

“CARBS!!?? Oh my gosh! I think I ate a bite of it. I’m going to the emergency room!”

It turned out that fat didn’t contain carbs, so bacon cheese steaks were given the green light. We were all eating ten pounds of lard a day, probably to cut the levels of oat bran that had built up in our bodies from the previous decade.

But wait! Steak and lard contained trans fats. We hurled all our mayonnaise in the garbage and loaded our grocery carts with these giant tubs of Extra Low Fat Ultra Light Don’t-Tell-Me-It’s-Butter because it didn’t have any trans fats. . .

. . . . Sigh. . . .

Then Katie Couric got a colonoscopy on live television.

Apparently, if you didn’t undergo a colonoscopy by the time you were nineteen-and-a-half, you could be sure that a giant man-eating polyp would burst out of your chest during your sleep and devour you. We became crazy for colonoscopies. All of a sudden, we were lined up like cars on an assembly line, all following Katie’s example.

Well, I’d better finish my green tea now. My health-and-wellness consultant named Mace will be here soon to measure my body fat index.

I’m sure you all know by now about body fat indexes. If I don’t get mine below twenty, I might not be around to blog tomorrow.