#842 Shredded Belief

Nutrition is getting to be a pretty hard thing. Either you can’t afford nutritious food or the food you eat is nutritiously suspicious.
I try to adhere to the “at least five servings of fruit and vegetables a day” rule. Sometimes it’s tough. Take apples. I like to have one of them a day to keep the colon doctor away, but it’s getting pretty expensive to stay with a regular program.
The apples I like are now a buck-ninety-nine a pound. That’s right, 1.99 for an apple. ‘Cause that’s about what it works out to. The apples are big, plump and crisp. And they set me back almost two bucks apiece.
Now if I were a smart shopper I’d be saying to myself, “Gee what’s the most bulk and pure calories I could get for my money?” And I’d probably go down to Taco Bell and spend those same two bucks on a couple of 99 cent burritos.
Burritos keep me “running for the border” too. And Taco Bell’s trotted out a new value menu with 79, 89, and 99 cent items. Sure, they’ll send you to an early grave, but they’ll send you full.
It’s a sad state of affairs when a restaurant prepared food entrée costs half as much as one apple.
It’s hard to be nutritionally savvy just about everywhere. Take frosted mini-wheats. Their box proclaims, “Clinically shown to improve kids’ attentiveness by nearly 20%!”
How do you measure that?
“How awake are you, Freddy?”
“Well, I’m nearly 20% more awake than usual, Mrs. Johnson. That’s 20 over a hundred.”
But here’s what worries me. The disclaimer in extremely fine print says: “Based upon independent clinical research, kids who ate this cereal for breakfast had up to 18% better attentiveness three hours after breakfast than kids who ate no breakfast.”
First, notice how “nearly 20%” became “up to 18%,” so it was probably 15%.
Second, I’d hate to be one of the kids in the clinical study who they experimented on that didn’t get breakfast to prove their point.
Because basically, this study proved that kids who had a meal paid attention better than kids who were STARVING!
America, ya gotta love it.