Ruined by a Diet of Neurosis : Key to Health Is Common Sense, Not the Latest Fear or Fad

We are becoming a nation of food neurotics.

No, I’m not just talking about the recent flaps over Alar in apples and cyanide in two Chilean grapes. It’s more than that. It’s a pervasive, silly and growing belief that eating and breathing may be bad for you.

Pick up any newspaper--even before Alar--and you are pretty sure of finding a story telling you that something has been discovered to be unhealthy, or at least lots of it is bad for white rats, so you’d better watch out, probably.

The list of things waiting out there to hurt you seems endless: pesticides, air pollution, food additives, preservatives, steroids, chemicals in cattle, nitrates, food coloring, mercury in fish. We’re told we’d have to ingest many tons of a foodstuff for more than 70 years to be in any danger. We know that overdosing a white rat is not the same thing as letting a little bit of something slip into our diet, but we figure where there’s smoke, there’s fire, so we avoid one thing after another.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re lucky to live in a society where medical science daily uncovers something that is going to make us healthier. But we have trouble distinguishing between an awareness of scientific advances and being stampeded into foolishness over the latest misfortunes of white rats.

At the same time, we’re hearing over and over again about one or two things that are good for you. Manufacturers of gritty and non-gritty preparations are waging Fiber Wars on my television screen and I’m tired of it. If it isn’t that, it’s actors in commercials prattling on about the fact that they have finally discovered a breakfast food that puts enough oat bran in their diet. You’d think they’d paid off the mortgage, or made the last tuition payment to Harvard.

The American psyche and media act on one another in such a way that a bad situation apparently cannot be corrected unless we first go overboard in the opposite direction. The sequence seems to be: discovery of the problem (white-rat stage); growing concern; competitive media-driven hysteria; governmental overreaction (perhaps driven by a well-founded fear of lawsuits); public backlash, and lastly, moderation. Let’s hear it for the last stage.

As a physician who repairs the damage done to cardiovascular systems caused at least in part by unwise eating, I welcome a heightened awareness of the importance of the environment and diet in our health. I hope it’s here to stay. An informed consumer is a healthier consumer. And there are real dangers out there. But as the healthiest, most-informed people in history, we are also capable of taking up a loony health craze faster than anyone.

Right now, as we overdose on food fear, we’re giving people too many warning signs, alarm bells and flashing red lights. We are drowning out information on the dangers we really should be aware of.

Let’s relax a little. Prudence is fine. Faddish hysteria is not.

By all means, read the labels on the prepared foods you buy. (In fact, the California Medical Assn. is sponsoring a bill aimed at getting more explicit information about the fat content of prepared foods on labels.)

Yes, fiber is good. And a run-of-the-mill, well-balanced diet containing fruits and vegetables is probably going to give you all the fiber you need.

There are no guarantees about health. But before you succumb to a life of organic oat bran and distilled water, here are a few (just a few) additional pointers that may help you walk the dividing line between fads and common sense:

--If you’re an American, you probably eat too much animal fat. Cut down.

--Don’t smoke. Smoking is the greatest single preventable cause of death in the United States.

--Find a form of exercise you enjoy, and do it. If exercise is a chore, you’re probably not going to do it for very long, so find something you like.

--Finally, remember moderation. If you’re in reasonably good health, one root beer float probably isn’t going to hurt you. But a root beer float, a fatty steak, a big slice of banana cream pie and a few hot fudge sundaes every day probably isn’t a good idea.

For most of us, good health doesn’t have to be as complicated as some would have you believe. Not if we remember that faddish and healthy are two different things.