Adios to Enchiladas? No Way, Jose : Health: The nutrition monks who say Mexican food can’t be cooked in healthful ways didn’t look in the right places.

The health police want us to say adios to avocados and hasta la vista to fajitas. Mexican food kills. Or so the presumed guardians of the nation’s health and nutritional good sense would have us believe. The perfectionists at the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest have released yet another study on what’s bad for us.

Si. They’re the same folks who told us that movie-house popcorn would choke off our arteries and send us to the nearest cardiac emergency ward. But popcorn was just one villain in a long and apparently unending enemies list of edibles. The nutritional monks at the center earlier warned us that Italian food such as fettucine alfredo and Chinese food such as kung pao chicken would also hasten our demise.

And now gastronomic public enemy numero uno is Mexican food.

Mexican food is swimming in heart-stopping fat and oozing with high caloric bad stuff such as pyramid-high dollops of sour cream. And there’s no way, the sages of the center contend, to make Mexican food in a more healthful way and still have it be, well, Mexican food.

Well, kiss my quesadillas.

Mexicans and Chicanos have been making reduced fat and low-sodium versions of our favorite traditional foods for a long time. We supplanted manteca (lard) with polyunsaturated oils and shortenings since before Fernando Valenzuela was a rookie. We eliminated salt since before the World Cup was held in Mexico.

If you use the right combination of zesty chiles and fresh ingredients such as cilantro, you don’t need salt for flavoring. And we use lots of fresh vegetables, from jicama to tomatillos. We do it partly because we’re health conscious but mostly because our food is delicious that way.

I don’t know who the researchers at the center “studied,” but it wasn’t any Mexican or Chicano I know. Which brings me to another point. Lots of the food you encounter in “Mexican” restaurants is ersatz Mexican food. Gringoized stuff that my mother from Chihuahua wouldn’t recognize. Some folks seem to think that if you just deep-fry something--anything--and put a futbol- sized scoop of sour cream on it, it’s magically Mexican food. ‘Taint so.

I never saw sour cream on Mexican food until as a teen-ager I walked into a restaurant owned by a guy who was raised in Brooklyn. And those grease- and cheese-covered monstrosities called nachos--a tourist concoction masquerading as Mexican food if I ever saw one. I never heard of “deep-fried Mexican ice cream” until I saw I saw it on a TV commercial for a chain of pseudo-Mexican restaurants.

And what do the ascetics of the Center for Science in Who-Knows-Who’s Interest eat? Dandelions and gerbil pellets?