> I probably shouldn't admit this to you younger readers, but when my
> generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things. I'm talking
> about taking CRAZY risks. We drank water right from the tap. We used
> aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands. We
> bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings
> such as, "DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER."
>
> But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was - prepare to be
> shocked - we deliberately ingested carbohydrates.
>
> I know, I know. It was wrong. But we were young and foolish, and there
> was a lot of peer pressure. You'd be at a party, and there would be a
> lava lamp blooping away, and a Jimi Hendrix record playing (a "record" was
a
> primitive compact disc that operated by static electricity). And then,
> when the mood was right, somebody would say: "You wanna do some 'drates?"
> And
> the next thing you know, there'd be a bowl of pretzels going around, or
> crackers, or even potato chips, and we'd put these things into our mouths
> and
> just...EAT them.
>
> I'm not proud of this. My only excuse was that we were ignorant.
>
> It's not like now, when everybody knows how bad carbohydrates are, and
> virtually every product is advertised as being "low-carb," including beer,
> denture
> adhesives, floor wax, tires, life insurance and Viagra.
>
> Back then, we had no idea. Nobody did! Our own MOTHERS gave us bread!
>
> Today, of course, nobody eats bread. People are terrified of all
> carbohydrates, as evidenced by the recent mass robbery at a midtown
> Manhattan
> restaurant, where 87 patrons turned their wallets over to a man armed only
> with a strand
> of No. 8 spaghetti. ("Do what he says! He has pasta!") The city of Beverly
> Hills
> has been evacuated twice this month because of reports - false, thank
> heavens -
> that terrorists had put a bagel in the water supply.
>
> But as I say, in the old days we didn't recognize the danger of
> carbohydrates. We believed that the reason you got fat was from eating
> "calories,"
> which are tiny units of measurement that cause food to taste good. When we
> wanted
> to lose weight, we went on low-calorie diets in which we ate only inedible
> foods
> such as celery, which is actually a building material, and grapefruit,
which
> is
> nutritious but offers the same level of culinary satisfaction as chewing
on
> an Odor
> Eater.
>
> The problem with the low-calorie diet was that a normal human could
> stick to it for, at most, four hours, at which point he or she would have
no
> biological
> choice but to sneak out to the garage and snork down an entire bag of
> Snickers,
> sometimes without removing the wrappers. So nobody lost weight, and
> everybody felt
> guilty all the time. Many people, in desperation, turned to disco.
>
> But then along came the bold food pioneer who invented the Atkins Diet:
> Dr. Something Atkins. After decades of research on nutrition and weight
> gain - including the now-famous Hostess Ding Dong Diet Experiment,
> which resulted in a laboratory rat the size of a minivan - Dr. Atkins
> discovered an amazing thing: Calories don't matter! What matter are
> carbohydrates.
>
> Dr. Atkins' discovery meant that - incredible though it seemed - as long
> as you avoided carbohydrates, you could, without guilt, eat high-fat,
> high-calorie foods such as cheese, bacon, lard, pork rinds and whale. You
> could eat an
> entire pig, as long as the pig had not recently been exposed to bread.
>
> At first, like other groundbreaking pioneers such as Galileo and Eminem,
> Dr. Atkins met with skepticism, even hostility. The low-calorie foods
> industry went
> after him big time. The Celery Growers Association hired a detective to -
> yes -
> stalk him. His car tires were repeatedly slashed by what police determined
> to be
> shards of Melba toast.
>
> But Dr. Atkins persisted, because he had a dream - a dream that, some
> day, he would help the human race by selling it 427 million diet books.
And
> he did,
> achieving vindication for his diet before his tragic demise in an incident
> that
> the autopsy report listed as "totally unrelated to the undigested 28-pound
> bacon
> cheeseburger found in his stomach."
>
> But the Atkins Diet lives on, helping millions of Americans to lose
> weight. The irony is, you can't tell this by looking at actual Americans,
> who have,
> as a group, become so heavy that North America will soon be underwater as
> far inland
> as Denver. Which can only mean one thing: You people are still sneaking
> Snickers.
> You should be ashamed of yourselves! Got any more?
