FISHY STORY!
This has been a bad
week for people like me who get their medical news from USA Today. A few days ago I read about a scientist who claims pecans
(my favorite) may not be as healthy to consume as previously believed. Just
when I think I’m eating the right stuff, some nut comes along and ruins
everything.
It was plenty confusing
when coffee was reported to be bad for us, then good for us. Researchers were
sure it caused heart attacks, but it prevented strokes—except for decaf, which
not only caused strokes, but was related to diabetes. I’m sure I got that all
wrong, but so what. It’s all going to change soon, anyway.
I was so baffled a
few years ago about whether or not peanuts were good for me that it actually
drove me to start drinking. That was a good thing because they said alcohol
helped your heart, but it ended up as bad news because then they said it wasn’t
the alcohol that was beneficial, but the grapes. And I had been drinking
beer.
A health alert this week took the cake. Cake, by the way, is not good
for you, unless it’s chocolate, which has aphrodisiac qualities. But chocolate also
has caffeine, which is bad for you (unless it’s the same amount of caffeine
that was good for you if you were drinking coffee before August of 2007.)
It was this week I
learned that some salmon contains way too much mercury. Ever since the first
report several years ago that salmon had beneficial Omega fatty acids, I’ve
been chowing down on anything that swims upstream to die: Coho, Chinook, King, Alaskan
pink and sockeye. I have eaten smoked, fresh and canned salmon. If my heart
wasn’t bright red before, it is now.
Then I saw this
headline last week in USA Today:
FARMED SALMON MORE
DANGEROUS TO EAT THAN WILD SALMON
Of course,
statistics about what’s dangerous can be misleading. Maybe some of those people
fishing for wild salmon were eaten by bears. That’s the kind of data that gets
lost in those fancy university studies.
But no, farmed salmon
is apparently worse for us. At least today. So I decided to adjust my diet
accordingly. In the supermarket it’s hard to tell wild from farm-raised. They
all look pretty dead to me.
My doctor said I could eliminate salmon
from my diet altogether and opt instead for fish oil pills, which apparently
aren’t made from fish at all, but are made from Docosapentaenoic Acid. Let’s
see. Lox and bagels or Docosapentaenoic Acid and bagels? There are no easy
choices in life.
By the way, I never believed the
marketing claims that eating fish regularly was good for your memory. When I
was in high school I ate fish sticks three days a week and tuna sandwiches on
weekends. Then I went to college where I spent half my waking hours looking for
my car, my spiral notebook or my wallet.
I also couldn’t find a date.
I’m getting hungry writing about
all this food. I think I’ll have smoked salmon on a bagel and for dessert, a
handful of chocolate-covered pecans. See you next week…if I live that long.
