How to Write a Blog Entry, with Spice

Think these entries just come to me fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus?

Oh my children, not so easy.

I'm up late, checking the news for any mention of lactose intolerance. What's this? An Australian gossip column. Always a first choice for health information.

Trotting through the marquee was Skeletal Spice's hairdresser, Ben Cooke (with pal Angela Weigard), so we asked him how Posh stays so skeletal. "She's wheat-intolerant and lactose-intolerant," Ben said. "She eats fruit, steamed white fish and vegies." We didn't think she gorged on chops.

It's not news that Victoria Beckham, alias Posh Spice, is lactose intolerant, at least not to those who read LI Celebrity Alert: Orlando Bloom and Victoria Beckham. And just what does a diet of fruit, steamed white fish and vegies have to do with lactose intolerance? Poshie, those chops are just as lactose free.

Silliness. But somehow that leads me to Want to be skinny? Sassy diet book tells how by John Rogers of The Associated Press.

Which tells of the latest manifestation of our celebrity madness, of how Skeletal, er, Posh, er, Victoria, made a book famous merely by picking it up and never reading it.

"Skinny Bitch" [by former models Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman] quickly became a word-of-mouth hit upon publication in December 2005. More than 200,000 copies are in print, according to its publisher, Running Press of Philadelphia.

It got a significant international boost in May when L.A.'s hottest skinny celebrity, Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham, playfully held up a copy at the trendy Kitson's boutique in Hollywood while paparazzi clicked away.

"She never bought the book ---- she just picked it up," Fraser Ross, the store's owner, told The Associated Press.

But no matter, "Skinny Bitch," shot up top sellers lists in Beckham's native England and broke through to the No. 3 spot on The New York Times paperback advice list of best sellers.

Hmmm. Promising. Skinny Bitch is a vegan cookbook, and those are a staple of my posting.

I do a bit of checking first. I don't endorse any of the books I mention in this blog, but I try to find out enough about them so that the truly nutty science-is-what-we-say-it-is wackjobs are screened out.

So what's the first thing that I find? A blog by lushposh. No, seriously. I've stopped trying to make this stuff up. And a blog post of hers titled Skinny Bitch: A Beginner’s Guide. It even has a picture of Kim.
Or of Rory. It doesn't matter. They've merged into one in my head, a mouthpiece for the worst junk diet advice you'll get this side of a homeopath.

All this from lushposh, who interviewed Rory and got the horseshit from the horse's mouth. Remember, lushposh is an admirer. She put all this stuff on her blog and thought it made wonderful sense. No child left behind, indeed.

The basic concept of the Skinny Bitch diet is surprisingly simple: "You need to get healthy if you want to get skinny." And to be healthy by the authors’ definition, you should eat foods that are easy to digest, rich in nutrients and free of harmful additives.

That means saying goodbye to sugar (aka "the devil") and products containing it, and not just because of empty calories. "When sugar enters your body, it’s acidic," Freedman says. "When you put acidic foods into your body, in order to protect your organs, your body produces fat cells."

Again, I am not making this up. This is coming from an author of one of the best selling diet books in the country. Or at least of a country in which sugar is acidic (it's not) and it doesn't make the most essential energy component of metabolism (glucose, the end product of all sugar breakdown) and causes fat cells to appear as protection (a scam unknown even to the Mafia.)

But there's hope.

"Kim and I are pigs," she declares. "We live to eat, and there’s no reason you should have to live without cookies. We just read the ingredients and look for better substitutes for sugar, like evaporated cane juice, brown rice syrup, molasses, raw sugar, beet sugar, maple syrup, things like that."

Things like that there. Let's go over them there things.

▪ evaporated cane juice - sugar
▪ brown rice syrup - sugar
▪ molasses - sugar
▪ raw sugar - sugar
▪ beet sugar - sugar
▪ maple syrup - sugar

Some of these are chemically identical to sucrose, or table sugar; others, like brown rice syrup, is a mixture of complex carbohydrates and maltose. Maltose is just two molecules of glucose. All of these sugars behave identically in the body, breaking down to glucose. None are nutritionally better for you. Perhaps one must approach them on the metaphysical plane to truly appreciate their spiritual side. Science it ain't, though.

The rest is a mosh of every bad vegan myth that any sensible vegan should be embarrassed to be associated with.

Meat takes a long time to break down in the body, and much of it ends up just staying put, blocking the intestines and slowing the metabolism.

Blather.

"You are physiologically addicted to cheese because it contains casein, which breaks down into opiates in your body," Freedman explains.

Yes, casein breaks down into casomorphins, a scary-sounding chemical whose dreadness can be found all over the vegan literature, although, tellingly, not anywhere else. It's identical to morphine apparently, although somehow also only one-tenth its strength. What happens to the casomorphins once you eat them? I haven't found any medical research that can answer that question, but no good anti-milk conspiracy theorist would let that stop them from proclaiming that cheese is addictive.

I can't stop a juggernaut like Skinny Bitches just by mocking its lack of science. That's obviously one of its selling points. The two-headed, four-breasted Kim/Rory monster dresses up the thinnest nutritional advice - skip sugar, eat fruits, go for whole grains - with thick slabs of pseudoscience, short skirts, bare midriffs, blonde hair and a you go girl insouciance filtered though a potty mouth. Who needs science when you have all that?

Me. Just me against the world. And against Posh Spice. Who looks like this.


I just lost, didn't I?