Add to favorites

When I was a young teen in the early ’70s, I can remember coming to breakfast one morning and my father was sitting at the end of the table crabbing about his breakfast.

My father had eaten the same thing for breakfast for decades. Two poached eggs, 2 pieces of toast slathered with butter, and on many occasions, a couple of pieces of bacon.

Now he sat there staring at a bowl of cereal.

I guess he must have had a physical. His doctor told him to quit eating eggs and suggested that he have cereal instead. So my father was staring down at a bowl of Cornflakes. He was not excited.

My father never had a weight problem. Maybe his cholesterol was rising. That would explain the doctor of the day telling him to quit eating eggs. It was all over the news: Eating fat causes cholesterol to rise. So stop eating fat. Stop eating eggs.

If you are anywhere near my age, you are going to find this video link very interesting. It’s a retrospective done by the NY Times on what was happening in the medical field as it relates to food, and how the advice we were given was very, very wrong. And if you’re younger, this is a great history lesson and a warning that sometimes the experts don’t really know with any confidence what is actually the best advice.

My father was never a big dessert guy. He only ate dessert on holidays, and even then he probably didn’t finish his. Interesting thing is, as the years of eating cereal for breakfast passed, my father’s interest in sugar increased. He was now hooked on carbohydrates. His cereal of choice became Frosted Flakes. And even later, I was witness on more than one occasion when he sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar on top of his Frosted Flakes.

That’s when he gained weight. And became a borderline diabetic.

So much for the advice he got.