When it's enough

I'll admit to a certain amount of confusion regarding product labeling in regards for the ever shifting standards of what is good for me. Reading the labels leaves me somewhat dizzy and increasingly confused as the information seems to indicate how much, caloric content and the daily nutritional needs the recommended serving size will fulfill.

I only have one question.

How do you eat HALF a bagel?

What lunatic mind thought that half a bagel was a serving size?

Now, these are not the tractor tire sized extra jumbo can you feel the flab piling up on your hips and thighs bagels. They are, allegedly, the bagels that regularly sell on the grocery store shelfs carefully masquerading as 'small'.

The same thing goes with the cereal labels. I have discovered that far from believing a soup bowl of cereal is a serving, they believe something quite a bit less. It reads like this:

CALORIES - Cereal 190. And folks, let it just be said that this is for a one cup serving of DRY cereal.

Let us be daring and add milk.

If we choose the 1/2 cup Vitamins A&D Fat Free Milk (which is, admit it, a lot like drinking white water), then we add a gracious 40 calories to the bowl which brings our grand total to 230 calories per serving with 25 of those calories being comprised of the dreaded fat that is certain to render humans as extinct as dinosaurs in short order. By the way, a half-cup serving of milk has ZERO grams of fat. But those delightful FAT calories are IN THE CEREAL which is supposed to help you lose the weight.

Should you happen to be possessed with a daredevil spirit and unconquerable desire for WHOLE MILK then you have just jacked up your calorie content and fat intake by a whopping 70 added milk calories, instead of the previously mentioned 40, and filled our jiggling bellies and hips up with an increase of 8 grams of fat to your bowl and makes our grand total climb to 260 calories for that same fatted cereal to which we have added the 8 grams of fatted milk to create a fatted calf - or thigh - or . . . oh well, you get the idea.

The confusion here is that we aren't comparing apples to apples but rather calories to grams to ounces to cups.

I think I need a nap.

Why can't they just say simply:

Cereal all by itself: 190 calories out of which 25 are plain old fat just like what jiggles when you walk.

Add no fat milk and it's just the same calories for the cereal except now it is wet and soggy in your bowl.

Add whole milk and in short order you, too, can be a model for E'Lanes Full Figured Stately Woman Dress Barn in Iuka. Which should really say E'Lanes clothes warehouse for folks who can't buy off the rack at Wal-Mart anymore.

If the governmental people who are so dang concerned about our welfare and health issues really wanted to do something to help us out, why are fresh fruit and vegetable prices the equivalent of taking out yet another mortgage on your house at every shopping trip?

If this is what we are SUPPOSED to be eating, then why can't we afford it? Now I am just a dumb, blonde, Southern Woman, but the math works out like this for me: If you want people to eat more vegetables, then make the prices on them lower!

Simplistic as that sounds, I'd buy more vegetables if they price were less...and frankly, I'd buy more if they tasted like a T-bone grilled to perfection over slow coals. Now that's a job geneticists SHOULD be working on instead of trying to find new ways to make the wrinkles of celebrities dissapear without airbrushing.

Can you imagine biting into a banana that tasted more like a big old banana split with chopped walnuts, chocolate fudge sauce and hot caramel over rich chocolate ice cream and strawberries?

Or the brocolli that kids feed to the dog under the table could be made to taste just like Twinkies and Ho Ho's without sacrificing the nutrition that the food pyramid keeps screaming at us?

And by the way, why exactly is it a pyramid?

None of the mummies I have ever seen looked like they were particularly healthy. But I digress.

When we get to the point that it has become more about the numbers than the taste, we have gone too far in the polar opposite of decent food at a decent price.

Feel free to let me know when we swing back in that direction. Or if scientist make that breakthrough we are all hoping for where you can eat one spinach leaf and regain your youth and vitality and the figure you so richly deserve.