Tough Winter
By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male
Winters
are tough up here on Sweetwater Hill. First
of all it is darned cold. When we drove
past the Sinks on the way home from Logan the other night it was thirteen degrees
below zero. Another tough thing on the
hill is having to plow a snow covered driveway sitting astride a four-wheeler in
the midst of a snow storm made unbearable by a howling, freezing wind.
By
contrast, it is kind of cozy sitting in our warm house by a roaring fireplace watching
those weather conditions through the window.
Ann, my wife, is on a propane
conservation kick, however, and a roaring fire is not an available
commodity in our house. Instead, she
uses our winter shut-in time as an opportunity to lecture me on my sinful
eating habits. Ann and I stand on opposite
sides of the issue of what is good to eat.
In my world, high value foods are those that are pleasurable to the
taste. Ann, on the other hand, judges
the value of food like she does medicine. If it tastes bad, it is likely good for you.
If
I were to use Ann’s scoring system my favorite health-food snack of French
fries and M & M Peanuts wouldn’t even show up on her Good Things to Eat list.
That is because her list is overloaded with strange sounding things like
kale, and broccoli, and Brussels sprouts which taste, indeed, like medicine. She pooh-poohs my argument that potatoes and
goober peas (peanuts to you) are vegetables.
What she does lecture me about, though, is
that everything I think is good to eat has likely been injected with partially
or fully hydrogenated oils by evil and conspiring men. Partially hydrogenated oils are a creation of
men who use hydrogenation to make things solid but spreadable at room
temperature (for example margarine). Partially
hydrogenated, according to Ann, is the worst because it creates trans-fats, and
Ann is so against anything containing trans-fats that I began to worry that she
might know something that I don’t. After
coming across a study by researchers at UC San Francisco I really began to
worry. They followed one thousand
healthy men under the age of forty-five who ate various amounts of trans fats,
and they found that men in that age range who ate the most trans-fats did
measurably worse on a word recall test.
The results showed that each additional gram of trans-fat consumed per
day was associated with 0.76 fewer words recalled, meaning that those that took
in fifteen grams per day would have a decrease in the number of words recalled
by as many as eleven or twelve, a drop of about ten percent. Well at least we know now why I can’t
remember your name. Based on that study,
the only thing worse that I could eat would be my friend Scott’s homemade goose
jerky.
Ann
claims that she works hard to keep me healthy because she is afraid that I
might expire and leave her alone up here on the hill. She tells me over and over that her lectures
about healthy living are for my own good and she wouldn’t put up with my
unhealthy habits and whining if she didn’t love me and want to keep me
around. So I shaped up (kind of) and
tried to follow her counsel. And then I
read another scientific study. It seems
that the anti-bacterial soap that I use multiple times every day as a way of
ridding myself of germs is likely causing more harm than good. According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, anti-bacterial soap contains an antimicrobial agent called
triclosan which, among other things, causes liver fibrosis and cancer in
laboratory mice along with being linked to endocrine disruption that could
cause infertility, and impaired muscle function. What’s worse, triclosan is used in liquid
hand soaps, toothpastes, shampoos, cosmetics, plastics, yoga mats, cutting
boards, and ice cream scoops. I might be
able to avoid yoga, but ice cream scoops are beyond my ability to resist.
There
is only one thing left to do. I am going
to lay down in the fetal position in front of our cold fire place and suck my
thumb while trying to absorb some heat from the pilot light. Have a happy Thanksgiving and don’t worry
about me. I will get by ……… somehow.
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