David Brooks weighs in

We completely missed all of the news this week regarding food.  As an editorial and personal policy, we completely ignore any government department that wants to tell us what to put in our mouth.  Yes, yes they've done some productive stuff in the past, like figuring out what causes pellagra and rickets.  But lately it's all about how fat everyone is.  So the good news is, the food pyramid is new, improved, incomprehensible and irrelevant.  The dietary news one-two punch is that 1) fat people are less likley to die just because they are fat and 2) thin people are more likely to die just because they are thin.  Presumably people in both groups are as likely to die of something eventually as everyone else is.

This has sent David Brooks into paroxysms of glee.  In his NYT editorial this week he thoughtfully reflects on what this means about our relationship with Mother Nature:

...she does want you to have a Cinnabon, as long as it isn't bigger than Delaware. And she does want you to have a fourth glass of wine and lecture the dinner table on the future of the papacy based on your extensive reading of the "Da Vinci Code."  She wants a little socially productive mediocrity.
Darwin was wrong about the survival of the fittest: it's really the survival of the healthy enough to get by.

And he is so right to point out that this doesn't only apply to physical health, but also to mental health:

The shallowest people end up blissfully happy and they are so vapid they don't even realize how vapid they are because vapidity is the only trait that comes with its own impermeable obliviousness system.

Or, as Nota McGreevey says: Envy the stupid people.

Can we really miss the chance to mention Paris Hilton: she's bound to be happy, but she will bite the big one sooner than I will, if the statistics hold. Eat or Die!