Skip The Part About Leaving A Beautiful Corpse

Meet Donna Simpson, a public suicide-in-progress. Simpson's stated life ambition is to become the world's fattest woman, hoping to reach the 1,000 pound mark within two years. At around 600 pounds, she is already unable to walk  distances of more than a few feet without using a cart.  At 1,000 pounds, she is likely to be completely immobile, permanently bed-ridden by her own choice.

Disgusting? You bet. But I can't help but be impressed by her ability to set a worse example than her cartoon namesake, Homer Simpson:

                                Not The World's Worst Role-Model

For those who would rather not eat ten large bags of potato chips at a single sitting, I offer a few nutritional short-cuts seen during a recent shopping trip.

Above we have an 11.25 ounce box of pre-sliced Frozen Toast, sold for the  low price of $3.29, or about 41 cents per slice.  Look at the label. Amazingly, this pre-fab simulated toast product can be prepared in only 5 minutes! Wow. That's almost as fast as I can toast a bagel in my countertop toaster and about half as fast as I can toast bread.

The good folks at Pepperidge Farm are assuming that not only are you too lazy to toast your own bread, they are also banking that you are too lazy to butter it. To help, they have 'buttered' it for you by saturating it with margarine and vegetable oil. As a result, you'd be better off eating refried donuts than PF's overpriced grease-sponges.



The stuff of MREs:

Here we have  "Home Style" "Traditional"  turkey, gravy and stuffing packaged in unrefrigerated plastic tubs.  Why bother with the dangerous hassle of dropping a huge turkey into a vat of boiling grease?  Next Thanksgiving, just place one of these  containers in front of each dinner guest and be done with it.

Add some of these for good measure:

This is a 24-ounce package of prepared mashed potatoes. It sells for $4.00. In the produce section, you can buy 5 pounds of potatoes for $3.50 and it will produce about 7 pounds of mashed potatoes. Yeah, I know mashing potatoes is 'work' , but will a little exercise kill you? (Maybe, if your name is Donna Simpson.)

Size Two:

Pictured here is an 8-ounce box of frozen peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. It contains four two-ounce sandwiches and costs $3.49,  about 85 cents per  tiny sandwich or $7.00 per pound. Apparently fixing a traditional PB&J is just too much work for today's youth, 27% of whom are too flabby for active military duty.

Curiously, the FDA is currently considering passing regulations restricting the amount of salt that is put into processed food. According to the the American Medical Association, 150,000 lives could be save each year simply by reducing sodium consumption.

""Nothing is off the table," said FDA spokeswoman Meghan Scott. 

The salt industry disagrees.

Morton Satin [his real name-ed.], director for technical and regulatory affairs at the Salt Institute, which represents salt producers, said regulation "would be a disaster for the public." 

"If you consume a lot of salt, you also get rid of a lot of salt -- it doesn't mean it's an excess," he said. "I want to make sure they're basing this on everything that is in the scientific literature, so we don't end up being guinea pigs* because someone thinks they're doing something good."  

I fail to see how reducing our salt consumption to healthy levels makes us "guinea pigs", but I can see some obvious harm that will arise: if salt consumption drops by one-half, so will the profits from the sale  of salt. The FDA estimates that we each eat 3 grams of salt every day- someone has to sell all that salt and the sellers aren't happy with the FDA's idea.

*(One third of all American adults suffer from high blood pressure, probably due to years of being treated like a salt-gobbling guinea pig by the food industry)