Help! I don’t know what to eat anymore.

A prominent story in the London Telegraph today says that women who halve their consumption of red meat are more likely to suffer from depression.

However, just days ago, another article, from another study postulated that any red meat at all raised your risk of dying.

So, which is it? Or, can we just reduce our red meat consumption by half and die sooner than we would have, but be only half as depressed about it?

Shape.com has put together a list of 50 foods that we thought were healthy, but in reality are not. Things like popcorn, light salad dressings and trail mix appear on their list.

At various times, I recall reading that coffee would kill me, and then a few months later reading that it would save my life.

Pick a food, and somewhere out there are valid medical studies that have been conducted that have exactly opposing views on rather or not consuming it will be good for you in the long run.

I don’t think it’s the food that is bad for us, it’s what we allow the people that bring it to us through the grocery stores do to it that is killing us. I can’t even pronounce half the ingredients listed on the back of a lot of foodstuffs anymore.

Instead of salt, many foods are now having citric acid substituted. Instead of sugar, we get high fructose corn syrup. Because a lot of how we perceive how food tastes involves what color it is, a lot of foods now have caramel coloring added – to simulate or enhance it’s appearance as properly cooked. To acheive this caramel color, a number of artificial food colors are blended together. You can read about some of the tricks played on us on howstuffworks.com

There is a list over at purezing.com of some of the more dangerious ingredients we may be likely to find in our food, our personal care products or other common items around the house.

I’m certainly not advocating that we all move to the nearest commune and grow our own food naturally, although I’m not so sure that it wouldn’t do a lot of us a lot of good.

And, from personal experience, being selective about what you buy costs a lot of money that some families just can’t afford to spend. Organic foods are expensive, although less so than a few years ago.

And, there is all those gazillions of dollars that are spent on TV advertising, aimed at our kids, convincing them that they just aren’t good people if they aren’t hooked on the latest processed food phenomonem from our food manufacturing conglomerates.

Anyway, I don’t think anything in moderation is going to kill us of and by itself. Have a nice 4oz steak a couple of times a month. Drink a cup or two of coffee a day. Have a scoop of ice-cream after dinner. Drink a glass of wine.

These are the things that make life worth living in the first place. We just need to learn that “extra-large” and “jumbo sized” are bad for us and bad for the planet, and follow a rule of thumb that if there are more than two ingredients listed on the label that you can’t pronounce, it’s probably something you should leave on the shelf.

Oh, and we should stop reading those health studies that tell us things are bad for us. I think reading those studies are worse than eating a little red meat and drinking a cup of coffe.