White may be a great color for paper, cream, teeth, and multi-sexual duo rock acts, but it's not the healthiest option for food. As one of those of us thirty-somethings that pay attention to what we eat - most of the time - I've noticed that most ivory-themed foods have been included among lists of foods to avoid. Take these for example:
- Rice - the white variety is high in starch, with the best parts - the husk, bran, & germ - removed. This has led to what is undoubtedly one of the least manly and most yuppified food items ever to be placed on a plate: brown-rice sushi.
- Milk - fat, carbs, and cholesterol - if you "got milk", that's what you got. This is a big category because it includes everything that milk or cream is an ingredient in. Cheese, ice cream, chocolate, butter, yogurt, and pudding. Just google "milk" and read up a little on it. You might think twice about that next big glass.
- Potatoes - particularly the white variety. It's a ball of starch wrapped in a dirty-stained skin. Through a little butter and sour cream on it (see "Milk" above) and you've got a great arsenal to pack on the pounds.
- Sugar - this one's easy. The refined white stuff is scrubbed of any possible nutrients.
- Flour - the enemy of all those Atkins-bound pizza-scrapers.
On the other hand, a lot of brown foods aren't so bad, so long as they aren't chocolate or gravy. Green is good. Spinach, broccoli, kale and peas are just a few examples. Orange has its highlights. Sweet potatoes, peppers, and of course, oranges all are good for the body. Cheetos and Orange Crush are not. You can only take the orange thing so far.
So sticking with some color in your food is good for you. Best to stick with stuff made by nature, not by a factory in New Jersey. And most importantly stay away from foods that have excessively unnatural color, or have no color at all. After all, that stuff inside Twinkies lasts for years. And that's after you eat it.
