Health food

Recently I went out in the cold, rainy, windy night to buy some health stuff. My doctor thinks that folic acid will help reduce polyps, and with a colonoscopy coming up in the spring, I try to do what I can. He likes me to take fish oil tablets, too. And I usually eat a high protein, low fat power bar for breakfast and occasionally for lunch. So I picked this stuff up, checking the various power bars first to find the one with the most grams of protein, the least grams of sugar and fat.

To reward myself for being so careful, on an impulse I got a Snicker's bar at the checkout. It was a fair sized thing, but it was the smallest they had on offer. Nothing special, no Swiss dark chocolate or macadamia nuts. Just a plain old Snicker's. From force of habit, I looked at the nutritional information. Just 170 calories! Really. Not bad, huh. Then I noticed -- that was for one serving. Now you may think a single candy bar is one serving, but it is not. According to the marketing geniuses at the Snicker's labs, a serving is 1/3-- that's right, one-third -- of a bar.

Of course, that is ridiculous. This is not some giant Hershey bar neatly divided into sections that you may actually break off and eat over the course of a week. This is a single-unit candy bar, and no one is going to eat a third of it, wrap the rest back up in the paper and stuff it in his pocket for tomorrow. But it sound so much better to say it is 170 calories a serving than it does to say it is 510 calories a bar.

That is just 10 calories less than a Taco Bell 7-Layer Burrito.

Which I would rather have that a candy bar, but am afraid I would turn around and my doctor would be standing behind me in the line. I just know those things are a breeding ground for polyps.