It Isn't the Corn—It's You

So-called nutrition advocates are trashing high fructose corn syrup these days. I'm not a big fan, either, but that's because I believe soft drinks and ice cream taste better when they're made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

These nutrition advocates—"nutrition police" would depict them more accurately—believe that the proliferation of products containing corn syrup is the cause of obesity and type II diabetes.

I always like to stand up for the little guy, and corn syrup is an innocent bystander in our nation's nutritional decline. It's not to blame for America's carbohydrate crisis. Our eating habits are.

As my old pal, the Capitol Gourmet, recently pointed out, "All these folks are looking for simplistic answers to fatness, but they just can't accept the most basic one. People get fat because they eat too much. It's not what they eat; it's the quantity of calories in what they eat."

In the 1970s, I met a Norwegian-born Canadian named Herman "Jackrabbit" Johannsen, generally credited with introducing cross-country skiing to North America. He was 99 at the time, happily living alone in a small house in the Laurentian mountains, cooking for himself, doing well.

Just how old was 99 in the seventies? I saw his college diploma. He had graduated in the 19th century.

He told me that when he was 88 he attended a banquet at which guests, concerned that he looked a little frail, kept asking him if he was doing all right. He got so disgusted he walked across the table on his hands.

Johannsen lived to be 111, and he told me the secret of long life: Eat anything you want. Exercise. That's it. I'm proud to say that I adhere to fully 50 percent of his rules.