Perhaps our culture is not as greedy and money-hungry as we thought. After all, if we were willing to accept any method of acquiring cash, would there be such a uniform sense of disgust and outrage regarding a couple of recent lawsuits against fast food chains brought by a few fat people? It's nice that we're not as morally bankrupt as we might have feared, but the real question is why the response is so overwhelmingly negative? Sure, these cases push all the right buttons with the media -- lack of personal responsibility and frivolous lawsuits being at the top of the list. Suing fast food restaurants for making you fat and unhealthy certainly qualifies as a prime example for both, but there are other, less talked about issues that we should be concerned with.

For example, if you want to lose weight, what should you do? Exercise, of course, but you still have to eat in those rare moments when you aren't working or jogging. So do you eat a meat-filled, high protein diet while avoiding all carbohydrates? Or should you do the opposite and become a vegetarian? As it happens, the jury's still out on that one.

Oh sure, most doctors will cop-out on that question with a thin, watery, "Well, it's a careful combination of both..." Right. In what proportions then? How can the average American make good decisions about what to eat when our insurance won't cover a visit to the nutritionist? The shocking fact is that we might think we know what's best, but often we just have no idea what to do.

I blame all of the nutritional studies that wind up being reported in lieu of real news. We all know that drinking is bad for us, right? Guess again! Men who drink a lot are less likely to get heart attacks! Who knew? Same thing goes for coffee; first they said that it was bad for us because it raises your blood pressure and causes insomnia -- but then they said that it might help fight memory loss in old age. I keep expecting some scientist somewhere to discover that cigarettes grow hair and cure pink-eye.

The fact is, hundreds of nutritional studies are published in medical journals every year. The ones that make it to the newspaper or the Today show are only the most interesting fraction of the total (which should give you an idea of just how interesting the unpublicized ones are). It's the very conflict with conventional wisdom which causes desperate editors and producers to run with wire stories about new insights that reveal that, sometimes, things that are bad for us also have some benefits too.

It would be nice if they would publish studies that actually answer questions that we all have about food. Like, are eggs bad for us, or good? Should we use butter or margarine? Is garlic really good for us, or is this some sort of cover story concocted by the foul breathed international garlic cartel? The only thing I'm half sure about is that wheat bread is better for us than white. No wonder doctors have to go to school for ten years.

Even the obvious notion that eating a lot of food can make you a jowly slob can be blind sided by acquaintances who defy all dietary logic. We all know somebody who complains about being too skinny, no matter what they eat (by the way, I just want to send a quick, "give it a freaking rest already," out to all the hard-gainers out there). Of course, we all know plenty of people who are in an opposite position: people who claim to eat nothing, no matter how corpulent they might be -- in spite of the fact that we all secretly believe that they're going to bed with a pan of fudge every night on the sly.

All I'm saying, is that in a society which contains a significant number of people who believe in 900 number psychics, magnetic healing bracelets, and alien autopsies, it's a fine line between not knowing whether or not avocados are healthful, and not realizing that Big Macs make you fat.

The good news is that, according to a new book, poor people are more likely to be overweight than rich folk. So if these whingeing crybabies ever get the money that they hunger for, I'm sure that we'll see them turn into svelte little nuevo riche over night.

-B. C. Silvia