HEALTH WATCH : Fat City

The lifestyle pages have been full of stories about boomers who are sick and tired of being healthy. They’re falling off their exercise bikes and onto the couch, and there are even some who are picking up the old coffin nails again. (“Just one cigarette after dinner,” one of these lapsed nonsmokers was heard to say. Yeah, right. As soon as we finish eating this one potato chip.) Could it be that in this age of enlightened self-denial a lot of people are discovering that clean living, though it might make one feel healthier and virtuous, really is kind of a grind?

The falling-off-the-wagon trend flies in the face of science, which keeps proving that thinner is healthier and linking dietary fat to diseases from head to toe, or at least from heart to colon. But human nature doesn’t always operate by logic, something the marketers of fast food are grateful for.

Some years ago a burger chain pushed the nutrition envelope with its triple cheeseburger, carrying a whopping 69 grams of fat, more than anyone should eat in a whole day. That was nothing: Now, according to the Nutrition Action Health Letter, consumers can fall off the low-fat wagon by scarfing down half-pound burgers that have three ounces of cheese and eight strips of bacon and add up to a whopping 75 grams of fat. In their dainty, diet-y way, the newsletter folks have nicknamed such delicacies Suicide Burgers. They say the fat content equals three-quarters of a stick of butter. Probably true--but for plenty of consumers taste is a terrible thing to waste. Burp.