I'm just a nutritionist, so I may not know much outside my field. But I do know when I'm getting screwed. Take our current tax situation for example. I get a paycheck and the government takes a big chunk of it and calls it taxation. Then I put what's left over in an interest bearing account. Any money I make from the interest I get taxed on again. Then I use that same money to purchase something and I'm taxed again in the form of a sales tax. 

And if I sell anything I bought and paid taxes on if I charge more money than I paid for it, I'm taxed again. And if I want to make additional money by investing that same money, I'm taxed again on any profit which is called a capital gain tax. So, as I'm standing at the gas pump filling my car with gas I just want to explode because I'm taxed once again on something called the gas tax. Then I come home to pay my bills and when I open my mail I find a rather large tax bill for the property that my house sits on. I could accept paying tax on the property when I first bought it, yet, I'm being taxed over and over again every year on the same property. Now as if I haven't been screwed enough, I open the next letter and find a HISD tax bill so that I can pay for the schools in my district. Never mind that I don't have children, but just like the property tax I have to pay this tax every year. Then, if I want to give some of my money, (which I've already bee! n taxed on) to any family member, I'm taxed on something called the gift tax. When I die, after all the taxes I've paid, I'll be taxed again by the estate tax. Now more than ever I truly understand what someone meant when they said that we can count on two things in life, "death and taxes."

The sad reality here is that I just keep paying all these taxes because this is not an area I know much about. I'm just a nutritionist, not an accountant. Here I am following the herd mentality and keep forking out the money paying for my own slaughter. The more I think about it the more frustrated I get.

Now, back to me being a nutritionist. Nutrition is an area I do know something about and unlike taxes I'm a whole lot less likely to be taken advantage of. I can really understand how many of you out there must be extremely frustrated by all the dietary information that keeps getting recirculated by the media food chain. And like me, how many of you might be tempted to follow the herd mentality and act on some of that information. Like our taxes, we are constantly being hit my conflicting bits and pieces of information. Information that says one thing one day and just the opposite the next. It's as confusing as the current tax laws that span several thousand pages. Every time you tune into the news you're hit by a bizarre array of information that could fill up thousands of pages. So here are a few points to remember when it comes to trying to figure out the difference between an opinion and a fact.

1). If a study was paid for by the company that will benefit from it, take it with a grain of salt.

2). Just because a study says that something works, doesn't mean it's good for you. Look at the problems we saw with Phen/Phen. Oh, it worked all right, but for those people that came down with Primary Pulmonary Heart Disease or PPH, it turned out to be a real nightmare. Was it worth it to lose weight only to discover that you need a heart and lung transplant from the side effects of the medication? I think not.

3). Don't trust our governmental departments to know what's in your best interest, or to take responsibility for any problems that occur from their decision to give the go ahead on something. Do you realize that before our FDA approved the use of Phen/Phen, France had already outlawed the use of the two drugs because they saw a 9% increase in the number of PPH cases. In other words, who should be held accountable, the doctors that prescribed it or the government that approved it? After all, the information was published and readily available to our FDA; I even spoke about the health hazards that occurred in France before the two drugs became popular here. So, it would stand to reason that if I knew about the problems that already existed, our FDA should have too.

4). If it doesn't seem logical to you, it probably isn't logical to try it. Bodybuilders eat eggs. Eggs are baby chickens, therefore, bodybuilders eat babies. "I want to eat like an obese person, but look like a thin person". Or here's a good one. If I buy that infomercial product I can eat whatever I want and without exercise, I can lose all the weight I want! Yeah, there's a great buy!

5). Understand that there are as many different eating styles for different purposes as there are ways to tax us. In other words, there isn't any way that anybody can come up with one style of eating that fits all the different needs that people have. Between, vegetarians, carnivores, runners, football players, bodybuilders, cancer patients, diabetics, renal patients, heart disease, obesity, and so on and so on, when the media food chain starts touting one style of eating for everyone, as yourself if it fits your definition of "healthy." I think our government is the worst place to get guidance on how we should eat. Can you think of any other area of information that our government has done a good job on disseminating? They can't even balance the nation's budget, let alone understand that their food pyramid guide has some major flaws in its design. I wonder which idiot decided that red meat was as healthy as chicken breast, should red meat have been regulated to the top of t! he food chart where fats are listed? And why are beans listed along side red meat? Shouldn't they be situated along with whole grains? And why are high fat diary products grouped with low fat ones? Shouldn't the higher fat ones be moved upward to sit along side the fats? Letting the government tell us how to eat would be like me saying to you that I understand all the tax laws even though I've never read the book.

6). Just like taxes can be complicated, so can the information or lack of information that you get from the media food chain and books on nutrition telling you how to change your diet. Be careful out there, because like taxes where one day you make a mistake and find yourself paying the price of a prison sentence or excessive penalties for bad information from your tax advisor, you don't want to one day find yourself paying a different kind of penalty with your health from bad advice.