Mutagens and me

Since I got the news about mutagens, I have read diet and health stories the same way I read the sports news.

It was sometime in the 1980s that the health research community reported that fried meats could cause cancer, because of “mutagens” created when the raw meat hit the hot skillet.

By the 1980s, I had eaten enough fried meats to acquire a load of mutagens that would kill me several times over, if not the population of my hometown. So I stopped worrying about health news and its regular findings about things that might be killing me. It was curiously liberating, and also provided a health benefit. There were so many health news reports about carcinogens that I had been worrying myself to death. I believed it highly possible that worrying oneself to death might be, in fact, carcinogenic, which was something altogether different to worry about.

So I had been worrying myself to death about worrying myself to death about all the things that might be killing me. No more. Mutagens changed my outlook, and I went happily forward with death perched on my shoulder, waiting for its next bite of porkchop.

It has been more than 20 years now that I have been free of health news carcinogens. Last week I read the news that the health research community now believes that a low-fat diet probably does nothing to prevent heart disease or cancer. I read the anguished quotes from citizens who had jumped on that bandwagon a decade ago and have nothing to show for it but tongues that feel and taste like cardboard and nightmare dreams about blue milk on non-fat granola.

“Wait til next year,” I said, taking another bite out of a perfectly grilled kielbasa and cheddar sandwich on sourdough. The health news providers now say it is not low fat, but the kind of fat, that will head off heart disease and cancer. It reminds me of the health news about tomatoes. Regular intakes of canned tomatoes, especially the Italian, Roma, kind, were shown to help prevent prostate cancer in men. The news arrived about a year after my surgery to remove prostate cancer. Reading it, I scratched my scar and tried to calculate how many boxcar loads of canned tomatoes I had consumed in my lifetime, especially the Italian, Roma, kind.

Roma tomato news, and low-fat news, and carbohydrate news, are no different than baseball news from spring training camps. “This is our year,” all that news says. By October, the news has become, “Wait til next year.” It has to be hard on that percentage of the population, the men and women, who are determined to wake up in perfect health on the day they die. On that day, the health news people will publish evidence that worrying yourself to death about all the things that will help you live forever is, in fact, carcinogenic.