The Chocolate Diet

         Excuse me a second while I unwrap a chocolate kiss.
        I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now. How could you have missed it?  Chocolate – yes  chocolate – has been linked with weight loss.  But not in the usual manner.  No, according to a new study, people who ate chocolate regularly were actually thinner than non-chocolate eaters. Yes, thinner not heavier.

            Don’t you love it??

            Not exercise. Not carrots. Not low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie. The secret to losing weight is eating chocolate.

            Well, why not?  Just because we’ve always believed the converse of that doesn’t mean it can’t be true.  After all, a lot of things we used to believe were good for us have been proven to be dangerous.

            “Nothing like a little sunshine to clear up your complexion,” my mother used to say. And I’m sure she got her information on good authority – if not from a friend of a friend who was a doctor, then direct from my grandmother.  Certainly, it worked like a charm. Darned if those rays didn’t clear my zits right up.

            As for skin cancer – who even knew to worry about it? As it turned out, we had plenty of time to worry later.

            Then there was my skinny cousin, whose mother felt she needed fattening up. My cousin wasn’t actually skeletal, but her mother felt extra pounds were needed as a cushion to fend off disease.  So she routinely whipped up milkshakes thickened with raw egg and served them to my cousin.

            I wouldn’t have minded the milkshake part, but even then, I would never have eaten a raw egg. But not because I was worried about salmonella. I wouldn’t eat cooked eggs either.

            Likewise no one gave a second thought to cholesterol as we downed our chopped liver. In fact, I’m not even sure anyone knew what cholesterol was.

            So it seems perfectly plausible to me that one day, our grandkids will be saying to each other, “Can you believe for so long they didn’t recognize the value of chocolate? Instead, they ate all those carrots and vegetables – that’s why they got so fat! Had they only known.”

            But now we do.  And so I'm going to have another chocolate kiss.