Henrietta Hay's Column

OK. This is it! I've had it. I'm going back to bacon and eggs for breakfast, steak for dinner and hot fudge sundaes for a bedtime snack. If my doctor is reading this, I'm only kidding. But since the nutrition experts keep coming up with new theories for healthful eating, I do sometimes wonder why I have to give up most of the stuff I like. The last straw is the story that says that margarine is as bad for me as butter.

The new American eating habits are in distinct contrast to the food of my youth. My mother, a world-class cook, had never heard of dieting. We certainly weren't rich, but we didn't have to be to eat well. With milk at a dime a quart and butter 46 cents a pound we were OK. When a dish called for cheese, it meant a lot of cheese, the kind you bought in a big slab. When we used cream, it was the kind that rose to the top of the bottle of whole milk, was golden in color and almost too thick to pour. Bacon and eggs for breakfast were standard, and I was fifty before found out that it is legal to eat dinner without meat and gravy.

And then came the big surge in nutritional research, which said that if I want to live to a ripe and active old age I should start following some sensible basic dietary guidelines. I quite agree, and I've been doing it. You know -- low fat, high fiber, few eggs, and lots of spinach and go easy on the ice cream. But they keep changing the rules on me.

I wonder whether we have gotten carried away a little bit on this health kick. I consulted the catalog of my Information Store, the Public Library to see how many books they have on the subject of healthful food. I pulled up "cholesterol," and found 37 titles listed. Under "low+fat+diet" there are 38 titles. Under "nutrition" there are 275 titles. Obviously we are a community of diet conscious people.

But after all these Spartan efforts so many of us have made to get healthy, here comes the latest bombshell. Margarine - safe, healthy margarine - is not all that safe. It is right up there with butter in the danger sweepstakes. I always was a little suspicious of the stuff, but I started using it years ago. Now after all those butter-less years I'm told that fat is fat. Just eat less of it.

For a while "they" said too much coffee caused heart attacks or cancer or something. Actually, it does cause insomnia in a lot of people, but that never worried me. I can doze off in the middle of an Expresso. Somewhere along the way the experts said perked coffee is best. But now the word is that coffee made in an automatic coffeemaker with a filter is the best and that I am quite safe with 4 or 5 cups a day. They add that if I stop coffee cold turkey I will have unpleasant symptoms, but I knew that. Anyway, I have no intention of stopping. The thought of a cup or two of fresh, hot coffee after dinner makes the dullness of the rest of the healthful meal more tolerable.

Some things have stayed consistently on the approved list, but they are somewhere below the top of the list of gourmet foods. Take broccoli. Actually, I like it and it makes me feel politically correct when I eat it. It gives me something else to disagree with President Bush about, but it is not America's favorite food. In the effort to popularize it, they have come up with recipes using it for everything but ice cream.

Another old standby is garlic. It has been used medicinally since the beginning of recorded history. Some scientific evidence indicates that it really is valuable in preventing some illness. But if you get too healthy eating garlic, the social liability it entails may keep it from being worthwhile.

Just about everything is suspect. Some fish is coming from polluted waters. Frozen yogurt often has as much fat as ice cream. They're not sure that oat bran lowers cholesterol.

I keep thinking of the old saying, "All the things that I really like to do are either illegal, immoral or fattening." Oh well, I think I'll stick to my doctor's advice - Moderation in all things, including moderation -- and go have a hot fudge sundae.