Food Fads

Food fads are amazing things. Basically, advertising conglomerates figure out ways to get us to buy things and then inundate us at every turn with the latest trendy preoccupation.

Remember the oat bran craze of the late Eighties? Advertisers alerted us to this new, horrible, dreadful substance called “cholesterol” and, suddenly, we couldn’t get enough oat bran into our systems. Oat bran appeared in every food product imaginable and, boy, did we snatch it up. Quaker Oats published an oat bran cookbook and it went flying off the shelves. 

I’m surprised that during the nineties, we weren’t told to consume a pound of lard every day in order to decrease the dangerous levels of oat bran we had all built up. 

These days, it’s anti-oxidants. We must have anti-oxidants – and lots of them! Was anyone ever aware that an "oxidant" was a bad thing? Did our mothers ever shout at us: “Don’t eat that! It’s loaded with oxidants!”

Pomegranates seem to be the oat bran of today. Pomegranates are the new miracle food, for they’re teeming with anti-oxidants. Everything is pomegranate-flavored these days, including vodka. Imagine that – the clever marketing people at Smirnoff have convinced us that even ethyl alcohol is good for us. They put a pomegranate in it and we shell it out and suck it down. 

Green tea is another anti-oxidant-laden product. We drink gallons of it. Everything has green tea in it. 

Here’s the mother lode of them all: Yep! Pomegranate Green Tea. 

The folks who came up with this are probably billionaires now.  It’s probably little more than sugar water. 

We’ve been convinced that if we consume enough anti-oxidants, we’ll live forever and look like Brad Pitt or Halle Berry. 

This guy will probably wash down that ham sandwich with pomegranate green tea.

Doesn’t he look healthy? 

Oat Bran . . . Anti-Oxidants . . . 

I can just hear the chanting of U.S.A!! . . U.S.A!!