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EDITOR'S NOTE: Cole, the big baby, was out all last week, sick. He says. So today, we bring you a Cole Classic originally published Sept. 23, 2001, in which Burt presents more of his theories of how to stay healthy. It explains a lot.
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It's an argument I've been making for years:
Chocolate is a health food. Really.
According to this month's Reader's Digest, my favorite medical magazine, a University of California researcher pointed out that cacao beans are high in the antioxidant compound flavonoids.
Obviously, we need flavonoids. I think. I'm not really sure because I have no idea what a flavonoid is. Something like an Altoid, most likely. But it's an antioxidant, and I know oxidation causes rust, which makes big, gaping holes in my car.
Therefore, eating chocolate, which contains antioxidants, prevents rust and big gaping holes in your body, which certainly would be listed as a health problem not covered by most HMOs.
A Penn State researcher added that while the ingredients of chocolate include calories and fat, there was very little saturated fat, which is the bad kind.
See, that's another important fact to keep in mind -- fat is not bad. Only bad fat is bad. The rest is good. So you must ask yourself, which kind of fat are you?
Also, dark chocolate contains less bad fat than milk chocolate. I prefer dark chocolate, especially when used to bake dark fudge brownies, which must be extremely healthy.
Why?
Because brownies also use eggs, another maligned food over which researchers are changing their minds.
Eggs were attacked as a source of cholesterol. But now, the American Heart Association says cholesterol is more a product of saturated fat -- bad fat -- and an egg contains 1.5 grams, barely a pinch in the world of bad fat.
But eggs are packed with lutein and zeaxanthin. Those are antioxidants, which prevents your insides from rusting through to your outsides. Also, according to the heart association, these Rustoleum sidekicks help prevent eye diseases.
This article is filled with examples of bad-guy-turned-good-guy foods like chocolate and eggs.
What it all means is that I will continue to eat a heaping bowl of Snickers ice cream with a mixture of Heath, Hershey's chocolate and butterscotch toppings because sooner or later there will be a study proving the immense health benefits of such a diet.
When I was growing up, we were only beginning to learn that everything we ate, drank, breathed or touched would cause cancer.
By the time I was in my 20s and 30s, the studies were much more refined. Now we knew everything we ate, drank, breathed or touched also caused cholesterol and fat, both the good and bad varieties, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, warts, lopsided grins, revival rock tours, reality-based TV shows and the XFL.
And now, upon further review, we learn it was all wrong. Chocolate is good for you. Eggs are good for you. Avocados DO contain as much fat as a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, but two-thirds of the avocado fat is the good kind, which actually helps the heart.
Even mixed nuts, once a mainstay of snacking, were shelved because of too much fat. But now, researchers say, it is heart-healthy fat.
Twenty years ago, I would have been accused of inventing the phrase "heart-healthy fat" as a comedic device. Today, it's in medical journals.
So my medical advice to you, based on nearly two-and-a-half full minutes of careful research, is to pull the four-cheese frozen pizza out of the freezer, bake it and eat the whole thing. Some day you'll probably learned it saved your life.
Don't forget the dark chocolate for dessert. You wouldn't want your ribs showing through gaping rust holes.
— Seek further healthy eating tips from Cole at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com, or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.