Food fight

It has not been a good week for those of us who think we can defy Father Time with things like vitamins and food supplements.

On Tuesday, the Enterprise headline said it all: “Garlic study reveals no healing power.”

The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, was called “the most rigorous, head-to-head study of raw garlic and popular garlic supplements. … ”

Though the pungent herb may protect your blood by warding off vampires, it won’t thin the sludge in your veins.

Talk about a blow to the stomach. Those of us who have been swallowing those nasty pills for years to cut our cholesterol have been, well, wasting our time.

Turns out we were inflicting those nasty side effects — bad breath, body odor, flatulence — on ourselves for no reason. I think I’m gonna be sick.

As if that news weren’t depressing enough, it turns out that antioxidants — vitamins A, E and C along with beta carotene and selenium — won’t help you live longer either.

That study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, actually analyzed 68 other studies on antioxidants involving 232,606 people.

The good news: They didn’t hurt anything.
The bad news: They didn’t help either.

So the up to 160 million people in the United States and Europe who have been gulping antioxidants can find something else to swallow. (Like our pride.)

If you’re tempted by all this bad news to buy a gallon of ice-cream and pig out, well, that might not be a bad idea.

You see, a diet rich in ice-cream and other high-fat dairy foods can help women become pregnant. That’s good news if you’re a woman trying to become pregnant.

A Nurses Health Study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that women who ate at least one fatty dairy food a day were 27 percent less likely to suffer from one form of infertility.

Blue Bell, anyone?