Comparisons

I performed some perfunctory, grossly unscientific research into which foods are ‘fat burners.’ Supposedly, some foods are the metabolic versions of Devastator: individually they do exceedingly little but together they form a piss-your-pants terrifying juggernaut of fat annihilation. I plopped the words “foods that burn fat” into Google, which kicked back some depressing results: lots of generic, bland websites with loudly obvious URLS: www.burn-fat-now.com, www.e-diets.com and others. These domain names are designed not to promote education amongst the web-browsing public but, rather, to generate revenue for the site owners and their greasy-slick revenue-mongering advertisers. Some “scientifically proven” weight loss pill that the Norwegian population uses since 1930 to be beautiful; a vaguely Latin or Chinese berry mixture that “melts” one’s stubborn belly fat. Anyway, the sites did contain lists of food somewhere amongst the spam (no pun intended). The lists were not terribly surprising in their content. What surprised me was the scant overlap amongst them. It seems odd that sites culled together by Google’s search algorithm for this admittedly un-precise criteria had so little in common. Here’s a list of the foods the sites suggested burn away body fat, presented in no particular order: beets, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cherries, orange-flesh melons, whole grains including oats, berries, asparagus, soybeans, apples, eggs, low-fat milk and cheese, beans, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, ginger, citrus, bananas, and garlic. The three items that made the list which surprised are the spices. Cayenne pepper? Look. I know that correlation is not causation but nowhere in my humbly huge breadth of experience is there a link to svelte bodies and Cajun cooking. Ditto for cinnamon (Cinnabon, anyone?). Ginger seems fine (in the interest of disclosure, I ate ginger stir-fry vegetables for lunch today. Please support Spice of Thai restaurant by purchasing their delicious foodstuffs. Tell Sue that Don sent you. She will not give a discount for any reason, so do not try). Anyway, the list is obvious. Eat fruit and vegetables, say school lunch posters and middle-upper class moms everywhere. Adhering to eating only the foods on this list requires one to be vegetarian, so, ahem, shouldn’t I be as thick as a toothpick? (now, in the interest of fairness, one site did mention lean meat but with the caveat that lean meat is expensive and likely outside the budgets of most people.) What interests me is the few items which overlapped from site to site: whole grains / oatmeal, 1% milk, apples, berries and soybeans.

I eat these by quantity of buckets. Good for me!