Opinion: More good news on the vegetable front

Column first appeared in the July 20, 2004 edition of The Madera Tribune.

You may have heard the results of the latest research into eating broccoli, cauliflower, Romaine lettuce and spinach. It seems that women who eat more of those vegetables retain sharper minds as they grow older, and the assumption is that men, too, could benefit from the same diet.

Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that eating foods that are good for you is beneficial. In fact, it would have been big news if it had turned out that eating broccoli, cauliflower, Romaine lettuce and spinach didn’t make you any sharper, and gave you pains in your left shoulder to boot.

I’ve been eating quite a bit of broccoli, cauliflower, Romaine lettuce and spinach lately, and my mental sharpness hasn’t improved one bit. And, I’m getting pains in my left shoulder.

I have a theory that the average person is made to only hold so much broccoli, cauliflower, Romaine lettuce and spinach. Once you reach your fill, the excess begins to settle in your left shoulder, sort of like water on the knee.

The researchers implied that food such as pizza had no beneficial effect on mental sharpness, perhaps cancelling out the effects of the broccoli, cauliflower, Romaine lettuce and spinach.

A possibility is that those who were eating the vegetables in the experiment snuck out at night and ate pepperoni and mushroom pizzas. If that were the case, it could have been the pizzas that made them mentally sharper. But they were so sharp by that time that they didn’t mention it because they would have been laughed out of the laboratory.

I wonder — is pizza good for the shoulders, particularly the left one?