Quote Originally Posted by channlluv View Post
Having spent my high school years in Alabama where ketchup was considered a vegetable in the school lunches -- I'm not even making that up -- I can tell you that the thinking there is that soda is mostly water, so it counts as water, and if it's sweetened with Splenda instead of sugar, it's considered the healthy choice.

Booze: ditto -- mostly water.

Cigarettes: from tobacco leaves...it's a vegetable, too. Besides, they look so darn cool.
Jeez. Nutritonal food illiteracy is amazing.

I met a 70 yr. old woman 15 yrs. ago who rarely ate any veggies her whole life, even though she had a heart problem. She was raised in a rural area on Cape Breton Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia. I remember her friend, my partner's mother who was around 82 at that time: she was politely disgusted with her younger friend's diet but knew it was pointless to convince her to eat her veggies.