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"What just died?" I asked my wife from the other room. I rounded the corner into kitchen and saw that Sharron was unloading a box of Nuttysystems food.
I stopped in my tracks. Had I offended her? Had I just undermined her new diet plans? I lucked out this time, because she looked like she was about to gag. "Maybe..." she speculated, "it will smell better after it's cooked." Initially, when she had told me about the Nuttysystems plan, I thought it was a good idea. They send you your meals. You eat 'em. That's it. Supposedly, the meals are based on something called the Glycemic Index. I first learned about the Glycemic Index, when I saw a book called The Glucose Revolution. The book was sitting on a coworker's desk. The title brought to mind an image of a bunch of glucose taking over a government by force and installing its own leader. "Viva la Revolucion de Glucose!" This turned out to be an incorrect impression. What's the big deal with glucose anyway? I wondered. When I heard that some people were glucose intolerant, I thought that meant they went around making derisive comments about glucose like, "Glucose sucks!" and "I hate glucose!" Crazy anti-glucose people... My coworker tried to explain it all to me, but I wasn't really in the mood for anything technical. Silly and stupid was pretty much my mindset. "The Glycemic Index..." my coworker said. "The blah, blah, blah..." I heard. "...is a ranking of food based on how quickly the carbohydrates in it are digested." "Blah, blah. Food. Blah, blah, blah, blah." She handed me her copy of The Glucose Revolution, and something in it caught my eye. What I found interesting (okay, amusing) was that the authors of the book - men and women with PhD's who should know better - were referring to the Glycemic Index by its initials, G.I. In common medical parlance G.I. stands for gastro intestinal, which makes these initials very useful to someone like me whose mind sometimes sinks to a near, if not sub, childlike level. Thus, G.I. Joe becomes Gastro Intestinal Joe. Instead of blowing things up with a hand grenade, he blows them up with his butt. To use a term from The Glucose Revolution, a meal consisting of bean dip and chips would be considered "high G.I.," as well as being a highly effective tool in G.I. Joe's arsenal. Another example: Where I work, the distribution department refers to the processing of a shipment as the Goods Issue. Often, just for fun, when they tell me that the G.I. has been issued, I will say, "Upper or lower?" To which they will either say, "Huh?" or "Ha ha. You are such a child, Bruce. Why don't you grow up?" When my wife and I sat down with plates of Nuttysystems food in front of us, we discovered that G.I. actually stands for "Grossly Inferior." The food tasted like plastic. Sour plastic. Sour, slightly alien plastic that makes you queasy. With just a hint of cheese. We tried several times, but we couldn't get it down. Maybe that's the real secret to the diet, we theorized. The food tastes so bad that you just don't eat. We wrote it off as one of those failed experiments that you learn from. Either way, I hope that you, too, have found this to be educational, and I also hope that you have enjoyed today's highly sophisticated discussion of science. Because that's what I'm here to do. I'm here to inform. Next time, I'll be talking about stem cell research and why I think it is unnecessarily cruel to plants... |
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