Bran Flakes or Beer?

About 40 years ago, someone discovered that eating lots of bran might reduce the risk of colon cancer and heart disease. Next thing you knew, Euell Gibbons was doing commercials for Grape Nuts cereal and enlightening us about the coffee-like qualities of chickory.

Then they told us that artificial sweeteners would cause cancer. Never mind that the amount of sweetener ingested by the lab rats was the equivalent of a human eating 125 pounds of cotton candy each day for 600 years.

Then they said salt consumption increased the risk of high blood pressure. Now, they're not so sure.

The bran findings were based on the low incidence of colon cancer among some bran-eating tribesmen in some God-forsaken part of the world, where a cheeseburger would be considered a week on the town. What they didn't tell you was that the average life expectancy of the tribe was something like 35 years. If we all died at 35, there would indeed be a low incidence of colon cancer. And heart disease. And macular degeneration. And Alzheimer's disease. And so on.

I take all of these warnings with a grain of salt, so to speak, because I subscribe to the Benjamin Franklin theory of well-being: all things in moderation. If you eat a balanced diet, a little salt won't kill you. And if you get a little exercise, a cheeseburger is not going to cause cardiac arrest. And it was Franklin himself who said that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.