Dad's tips for healthy eating

If you want to live a long, healthy life, you can do no better than follow my father's lifelong diet. He is as fit as any 86-year-old has a right to be, and it can mostly be attributed to these few sensible tips for eating:

1. For lunch, eat a salami or bologna sandwich every day. Better yet, have both. Never, ever eat wheat bread or anything with the words "whole grain."
2. Also have a bowl of canned, high-sodium soup for lunch every day, even when it is 103 degrees outside.
3. Each evening, heap yourself a bowl full of full-fat ice cream. Then go to bed with this sitting in your stomach.
4. When your spouse is not looking, hide the low-fat turkey lunchmeat she bought, along with anything else that would threaten the delicate balance of high-fat foods you prefer.

In an effort to raise the nutritional value of his food at least a little while my mom was gone, I bought him some of that turkey lunchmeat mentioned in #4. At lunchtime I unveiled it with a dramatic gesture, talking it up as you would when trying to get a toddler to eat his carrots.

But toddlers are not easily fooled, and neither was my father. He poked at the turkey as if it were some laboratory specimen and shrugged. "I could try it, I suppose," he said without much enthusiasm. "Is it any good?"

That would be #5 on Dad's list: If it doesn't taste good, forget it.

His cereal cupboard contains sensible, age-appropriate offerings like Cheerios, Lucky Charms, and Trix. I was quite young when my parents cut me off from eating Trix. Now my cereals are more old-people than my father's.

Dad has far outlived his family members, most of whom probably ate their Wheaties and oatmeal faithfully. Not that he is without his health problems. His little pill container is just as full as other people's his age. But as Dad could tell you, those pills go down much more easily with ice cream than with a bran muffin.