Santa Foods?

With all the concern over food and health today, one particular individual comes to mind at this time of year that we all want safe and sound … Santa Claus.

And it’s not just what’s going on back at the North Pole (I’m sure Mrs. Claus makes healthy meals 364 days of the year), because there’s one day in which the big guy is fed by all of us.

Millions of kids all over the world leave milk and cookies and other goodies out for Santa, and he loves every bit of it. In the UK alone, he gets mince pies on Christmas eve and, if he ate every single mince pie left for him by these kids, he would gain 721,000 lbs.

No wonder Santa is portrayed as having the “bowl full of jelly” belly fat, which certainly keeps him warm at the North Pole, but his belly fat and BMI the size of Godzilla on steroids might get him saddled with a plastic vial of Lipitor in his stocking this year.

What about obesity, heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and all the other health concerns?!?

Well, in our haste to slim-size Santa, just keep three things in mind:

• First, our latest fad ideas about nutrition come and go (remember when margarine was GOOD for you, remember when eggs were BAD for you?). Santa has been around for a long time, still ticking, and keeps spreading joy to kids all over the world.
• Second, whatever he’s doing, it’s working for him, even if it doesn’t agree with our current theories. Sometimes we should relax and just embrace the joy of the season – even if we don’t have a clinical trial to back it up.
• Finally. Dude, Santa’s an elf. Cookies and milk could be nutritious to his elfish blood – like broccoli and Brussels sprouts to us! We could be doing more harm than good by trying to re-create him in our own image of health.

Here’s the bottom line: We need to let the jolly man be the jolly man.