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You
Are The Color of the Food You Eat
by Mad Dog
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It’s called What
Color Is Your Diet? and it does for eating what Garanimals did for
dressing kids. That’s right, it separates the color-blind from the
rest of us. |
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It’s
hard to know how to eat properly. One day eggs are bad and should be
avoided at all cost, the next they’re part of a healthy, balanced diet
as long as you remember to cook them so you don’t get salmonella
which, contrary to what some people think, isn’t a tiny baby poached
salmon that comes with the mini-eggplants, mini-carrots, and maxi-prices
at one of those très
chic restaurants that serve entrees which leave you saying, “Oooh! How
pretty! Now where’s the rest of my food?”
On Monday morning we’re told
that grilling is better than frying, but by the time the weekend rolls
around it turns out you shouldn’t grill over an open fire or you might
end up sucking down more than your minimum daily requirement of
carcinogens riding bareback on that slab of charred cow flesh. And
broccoli? It might prevent cancer and keep George W’s dad away, but
then we find out that, well…come to think of it, this pretty much
makes it a wonder food, now doesn’t it?
So what’s a person to do? Eat
by color. That’s the advice in the new book, You’ll Do Anything
We Say As Long As You Hear About It On Oprah And Plop Down $24.95 That
Would Be Better Spent On A Jacqueline Susann Novel, Won’t You?
Just kidding. Actually it’s called What Color Is Your Diet? and
it does for eating what Garanimals did for dressing kids. That’s
right, it separates the color-blind from the rest of us.
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The author says
blue is good for the brain, orange is good for the heart, and green is
good for his bank account, especially if enough people fall for this. |
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The concept behind this book is that the author wanted to retire
rich and remembered the axiom about a fool and his money. Just kidding
again. Actually he was thinking about what P.T. Barnum said about
suckers and how often they’re born. In the book he proposes that we
choose our daily portions of fruits and vegetables based on their color.
Thus, if your dinner plate looks like a rainbow you’ll be healthy, and
if it looks like the inside of a fast food restaurant—all yellows and
reds from French fries and ketchup—you’re going to die any minute so
you really ought to grab a napkin and scribble your last will and
testament while you still have the strength.
Of course since we’re in the
‘00s, officially known as the Decade of the Bandwagon, others are
already jumping aboard this trend. The Color Code: A Revolutionary
Eating Plan for Optimum Health, which is due out much too soon, goes
even farther by claiming that the different colors in foods have
different properties. The author says blue is good for the brain, orange
is good for the heart, and green is good for his bank account,
especially if enough people fall for this.
Red, it turns out, may actually
help prevent cancer. That’s not according to either of these books,
but according to Heinz, the unbiased company that sells 48 percent of
the ketchup in the world. They say that the same substance which makes
cooked tomatoes red also protects the body from free radicals. And no,
free radicals aren’t the terrorists who blew up the Navy destroyer in
Yemen last year, but rather little molecules that sneak up and attack
DNA when we’re not looking. Right, like we can be expected to watch
every strand of DNA every minute of the day.
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It will make Martha Stewart so happy she’ll be in Nirvana,
which hopefully means she can’t be on my TV. Unless, of course,
she’s mastered the art of being in two places at once, which is an
even scarier thought than the interviewees on Street Smarts
procreating. |
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The
stuff’s called lycopene, and it’s an antioxidant that fights free
radicals. Think of it as the body’s FBI, CIA, and X-Files conspiracy
all rolled into one. Except of course lycopene has never shot anyone in
Waco, forgotten to turn files over in an Oklahoma City bombing trial,
or—whoops!—misplaced a whole bunch of guns and laptop
computers. Well, not yet, anyway.
These new eating guidelines may
be disorienting. After all, we’ve gone from the four food groups to
the food pyramid to the color wheel in rapid succession. But once you
get used to the concept it will revolutionize your meals. Remember all
that money spent, time wasted, and ridicule you endured a few years back
getting your personal color readings? Now you’ll have the last laugh
because you’ll be able to color coordinate your wardrobe with your
lunch, and not do it by dripping it all over the front of your shirt.
This will not only make you stop feeling like a plaid eater in a striped
world, but it will make Martha Stewart so happy she’ll be in Nirvana,
which hopefully means she can’t be on my TV. Unless, of course,
she’s mastered the art of being in two places at once, which is an
even scarier thought than the interviewees on Street Smarts
procreating.
But there could be problems,
too. After all, like taking Prozac, spending your life in Internet chat
rooms, and watching Big Brother, this is too new to be able to
predict what the long-term effects will be. It may turn out that if you
eat too much green food you’ll grow envious. Too much yellow and
you’ll be scared of everything. An overabundance of red may stop
cancer in its tracks but it could also give you communist leanings. And
too much pale beige—you know, like Twinkies, Pringles, and that stuff
in the dish in the refrigerator under the green mold—could make you
boring. Blue shouldn’t be a big problem, however, since even though
too much might make you depressed, there aren’t many blue foods around
other than blueberries. Okay, there are blue M&Ms, but if you eat
those in the first place you deserve anything you get. After all, who
ever heard of a blue diet?
©2000 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them
while trying to decide what color to eat for dinner.
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