You've Got To Stop This, Bobby!

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published March 2, 2026] 2026

On January 7, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his side kick Dr. Mehmet Oz released new dietary guidelines. They ve once again flipped the whole food pyramid on its pointy head.

If I didn't have a character limit, this column would be 10,000 words and titled Totally absolutely never going to believe anything medical science says again and this time I really mean it! 

In 1973, Woody Allen presciently released the movie Sleeper about a health food store owner whose body was accidentally cryogenically frozen and who wakes up 200 years later in 2173 to find that the real health foods are tobacco and red meat. The doctors who unfreeze him are dismayed to learn that he consumed the likes of wheat germ and organic honey. "What?"  they exclaim. "No deep fat, no steak, no cream pies, no hot fudge?"  subsequently observing that "these were thought to be unhealthy [in 1973] - precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."

Guess what, folks. It's 2173. We just got there 149 years early.

If you've been alive for a while, you ve endured flipflops between the health benefits (or lack thereof) of margarine vs. butter, eggs, shrimp, carbs, saturated fats vs polyunsaturated fats vs monounsaturated fats etc.

But for most of my life, saturated fats were always the bad guy. I put extra virgin olive oil on my salads, and if I fried anything, it was with a heart-healthy canola oil. Eggs were limited to two a week, and shrimp to, like, never. When I think about all the guilt I felt eating even the smallest amount of butter which, by the way tastes so much better than margarine - I feel pure dietary rage.

So I was frankly astonished a decade ago with the sudden popularity of coconut oil. I started seeing it more and more frequently as an ingredient in recipes, and even Dr. Oz was flogging it as a health food that allegedly fights illness-causing viruses and bacteria, aids in thyroid and blood sugar control, improves digestion, and improbably as it sounds to me, increases the good HDL cholesterol despite its 12 grams of saturated fat per tablespoon. Surely even a bacon cheeseburger dipped in a hot fudge sundae can't have 12 grams of saturated fat per bite?

I've never had a primary care doctor who didn't caution that artery-clogging saturated fat puts you on the fast track to counting worms. Still, since a whole display case of coconut oil had magically appeared in my local supermarket, and Dr. Oz said it was OK, I decided to add a jar to my basket. But I only got five steps before the chest pains started and I put it back. It's like Mao waking up one morning and exhorting the Chinese to embrace democracy. I just didn't think I had enough life expectancy left to embrace coconut oil as a health food.

But it has just gotten a whole lot worse. Now our new Secretary of Health and Human Services is telling us to jettison all those formerly-healthy seed oils (canola, corn, sunflower, safflower, etc.) and substitute beef tallow. Wasn't it considered a huge breakthrough for public health when all the fast-food restaurants were persuaded to dump beef tallow for polyunsaturated oils? We could order the large fries and think of it as a vegetable.

Beef tallow, by the way, is the fat that surrounds a cow's kidney. Yum-mo! It can be used as an ingredient in cosmetics as well as in cooking and in products like soap and biodiesel. I'm not sure any of these things is exactly whetting my appetite or making me want to slather it on my body.

In a post that seems eerily right out of the Woody Allen movie, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote on social media several months ago: 'Did you know that McDonald's used to use beef tallow to make their fries from 1940 until phasing it out in favor of seed oils in 1990? This switch was made because saturated animal fats were thought to be unhealthy, but we have since discovered that seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic.'

Sorry folks, I have been so indoctrinated in my life against beef tallow (and coconut oil) that there is no way I am ingesting either. I'd probably end up dying from a reverse placebo effect: in my heart (literally and figuratively), I believe it will kill me.

Now alcohol is under attack. As in any alcohol at all. What happened to all those heart-healthy polyphenols in red wine that help protect the lining of blood vessels in the heart? The tide has turned and it's about to put Happy Hour under water.

Indulging in alcohol in moderation was once considered harmless, and, as noted above, possibly healthy, and may have well been why my kids survived to adulthood. That divorced working mom gig was a bear. I m definitely glad they didn't come up with this anti-alcohol news while I was in college as it would definitely have impacted my college experience. The night finals were over we were going to go out for iced tea?

But now alcohol is toxic. Any amount. However, I was happy to see Dr. Mehmet Oz who stood with RFK Jr. at the announcement of the new dietary recommendations in January say that alcohol is a social lubricant that "brings people together"  and that it "can give people an excuse to bond and socialize." Yup, it sure can!

The new recommendation that made me burst out laughing was that children not start eating added sugars until they're ten. Ten? So what are they going to serve at a birthday party? Broccoli? With candles stuck in it? Did these guys ever spend any time with their own kids?

So what are we weary health-oriented consumers to think?

As a senior citizen, here's my conclusion: Eat whatever you want because it'll come back into favor again sooner or later. I promise. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you've got to die of something.

So bring on the Krispy Kremes (which, by the way, are cooked in seed oils.) And thank you, Woody.

 

 

Speculating How I Came To Be Shaped Like A T-Rex

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published February 23, 2026] 2026

Packing up some grandchildren books to donate to the library, I came across one on dinosaurs. The T-Rex on the cover seemed somehow familiar to me. And then it struck me. "It's me! That's my body!

No joke, virtually all my body proportions are the same.

OK, I may be exaggerating a teeny bit. But let me make my case.

It may not be obvious when you look at me, but, like my reptilian antecedent, I have a really big head. I mean way up there in the percentile of large craniums. Hats have always been problematical, and even pony tails. You'll never find a picture of me with either. Fortunately for T-Rexes, this wasn't a big issue but they would have found it as much of a pain as I do.

Then there's the overbite. OK, mine isn't as bad as the T-Rex in the picture but if I were a child now, I d definitely be sending an orthodontist's child to Bishops. Perfect teeth just weren't as big a deal in my youth as they are now. A little (or lot) of overbite? Meh.

Like the T-Rex, I'm also missing a waist. My proportions are very...disproportionate. As in heavily weighted on the bottom. This is why I never wear dresses, only separates when you can buy the components in different sizes.

And then there's my tiny little T-Rexy arms. Seriously, my arms are waaay short. It's like they took all those percentiles off my arms and added them to my head. Even buying long-sleeved blouses in a petite size (I am most definitely not a petite person), the sleeve length will be too long.

By the way, just looking at the T-Rex s feet, I'm betting they had plantar fasciitis too. And good luck finding orthotics in the Mesozoic era.

Of course, the one proportion the T-Rex has that I don't is a long neck. It's not like my head sits right on top of my shoulders but let's just say I stopped buying choker necklaces decades ago.

Women's clothes are measured on fit models who are assumed to have standard parts. They are not designed for those of us with my configuration. Which I think we'll all agree is good news. But it makes acquiring apparel a significant problem.

I have long been aware that I seem to be composed of multiple different body parts that don't belong together proportionally on the same person.

How did this happen? One theory, of course, is that back when my mother was pregnant with me, women could drink and smoke as much as they wanted. And probably did. 

Of course now, a single drink during pregnancy will get Social Services at your door. If you ever watched the show "Mad Men"  which took place in the 1960s, pregnant women were actively knocking back alcoholic beverages, never mind smoking. This was certainly the case in my suburban neighborhood growing up. There were no restrictions whatsoever.

Maybe my Mom was hitting the cocktails pretty hard at certain points of my development. That margarita week must have been quite a party. It's certainly one explanation for the tiny little arms.

There s obviously another explanation. It could all be DNA run amok.

I should note that my oddly configured body wasn't as obvious back when I was thin. (I can hear people who have known me for a while saying, "You were ever thin?"  Get lost, OK?) I always wore a size 4, which in today's deflationary size market is probably a 2, or even a 0. (Personally, I think size 0 is what you should be after you've been dead a while.) But after my first marriage ended, I packed on 40 pounds eating the Post-Divorce Mrs. Fields Cookie and Chardonnay Depression Diet. Alas, I've been heifering, er, hovering around a size 16 ever since.

Alas, this added weight only seemed to exaggerate my unusual proportions. It quickly became apparent to me that for any reasonable clothing selection, I would be relegated to catalogs from the Talbots Butterball Collection or Lands End-Porcine. Logging on to Lands End in search of attire for the adiposely-amplified, I was happy to discover a feature called Virtual Model. You type in your assorted measurements, hair color, age, and voila, there is a virtual you standing there in your undies ready to try on clothes.

You can fine-tune the virtual you to a certain extent, but I did notice that "modify My Model" did not include such accuracy-enhancing features as add cellulite or increase sag . In fact, the My Model of me with my alleged weight and measurements wasn't half bad because of course, I had the flabless thighs of an Olympic speed skater. Given this, I enjoyed trying on bikinis and even making myself different races.

Alas, clothes that looked great on the virtual me rarely looked good on the real me because it didn't really create a facsimile of me that accurately reflected the data I gave them. I'm guessing the algorithm thought, "No way. If these were her measurements, she'd be built like a T-Rex."   So it fudged them a bit (more than a bit) knowing I wouldn't buy any clothes otherwise.

Fortunately, at this point I know exactly what size black slacks and white tops fit me on Lands End. My older granddaughter has observed that I dress like a barista from a lesser trattoria.

She, of course, has the svelte perfectly-proportioned figure of her mother. I hope her daughter inherits this body type as well. Hence, I have been too polite to mention the word "genetics."  Because somewhere in there, lurking where she least suspects it, could be dinosaur DNA.

Leave Balboa Park Alone

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published February 16, 2026] 2026

With the risk of sounding like an irascible curmudgeon, how soon can we evict the idiots on the San Diego City Council?

I am actually a life-long Democrat and I voted for those idiots. But I am despairing that they can make any good decisions anymore, especially where parking is concerned. Our City Council persons have excelled at conjuring up new and creative ways to make a dire parking situation in San Diego even worse and more expensive. It's clearly a gift.

I'm especially referring to you, Joe LaCava. I've been (past tense) a fan for decades. The La Jolla Light keeps editing out my comments about him. I'm allowed to say that I wish he could be relegated to a desert island, but not what I hope happens when he gets there. Joe, we expected so much more from you!

Back in 2021, the City Council took what they deemed the "bold"  step of wiping out requirements for businesses in areas near mass transit to have any parking spaces.

Were they also wiping out any requirements for business?

Meanwhile, every time I read about new legislation that reduces or eliminates parking requirements for new residential or commercial construction, I want to tear my hair out. Also the hair of the City Council persons who voted for it.

The two-part message from our governing bodies seems to be: (1) By eliminating parking, people will use public transit. (2) By "people,"  they mean persons other than themselves.

I've written about this before, but I wish that every single person on the City Council and their families were required to use only public transit for an entire month. That means going to work, getting the kids to school and sport practices, the dog to the vet, making medical appointments on time, etc. etc. I'm a huge fan of public transit (we never had a car when we lived in Sweden) but this city isn't set up for it. Expecting people to walk a half mile from a transit station to home with kids and groceries is a non-starter.

Meanwhile, the "daylighting" law that went into effect January 1, 2025 prohibits parking within twenty feet of an intersection with the aim of boosting visibility for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. This applies even if the curb is not marked or in the absence of No Parking signs. The tickets are a whopping $117. The law defacto removed hundreds of parking places in hard-to-park areas. Months into 2025, only 400 of the city s affected 16,000 intersections had had the curbs painted red. Which is how the city managed to issue 6,133 tickets and generate over $660,000 in revenue just between March 1, 2025 (when the new law became enforced) and the end of May of that year. The city, of course, is gleefully happy at this fortuitous windfall which is a testament to how truly unclear the law is and how difficult it is on many blocks to estimate the exact twenty feet. Meanwhile some 6,133 people returned to their cars from an eight-hour work shift or a nice lunch to find themselves $117 poorer.

But the new parking fees at Balboa Park are a whole new level of stupid. Anyone - well, except for City Council persons - could have predicted that charging for parking in Balboa Park would severely impact the museums, restaurants, Old Globe Theater, club meetings, dog walkers, and just general picnickers. And surprise! That's exactly what happened.

The outcry was so predictable. Balboa Park is a cherished San Diego institution, a sacred cow, if you will. Do not mess with the cow, er, park!

Every effort the City Council has made to backtrack/ameliorate the situation has just made it worse. First of all, those ticket machines where you pay are apparently seriously user-hostile. That alone would keep me from ever going there again. I have the techno frustration tolerance of a gnat.

By the time this column sees print, the new parking fee rules will probably have changed yet again. The most recent placating revision is going to give a discount to residents of the city but you have to apply on-line (sorry poor people without a computer!), pay a one-time fee of $5 to verify your residency (which requires a driver's license, vehicle registration, or utility bill) and also enter your vehicle's license plate number. Um, what if your residence has multiple vehicles?

This process takes up to two days, and the San Diego Union-Tribune (2/7/26) says you have to choose the day of your visit in advance. It's unclear how, even after you have paid that fee, you get a discount in future visits when you come to the park and are confronted with the ticket machines. Inquiring minds, even if they are never intending to come to the park again, would like to know.

Are these ticket machines programmed to know who are verified residents?

Just to make sure no one understands the system, the various parking lots have been designated Level 1 (i.e. nearest to anything you'd actually want to go to), Level 2, and Level 3 (a.k.a Siberia) with different rates for both residents and non-residents at each.

Level 1 rates are $8/day or $5 for four hours for verified residents, and $16/day or $10 for four hours for non-residents. Level 2 rates are $5/day for verified residents and $10/day for non-residents. Level 3 rates are first 3 hours free and then $5 for verified residents, and first three hours free then $10/day for non-residents.

In response to push-back from the citizenry, the City Council has managed to change the enforcement period to end at 6 p.m. (from the original 8 p.m.) to accommodate theater and restaurant go-ers. It should never have been 8 p.m. They have also, allegedly, backed off from paid beach parking. At least for the time being.

My parents taught me when I was approximately five that if you've made a mistake, admit it and try to fix it. If it were up to me, the City Council would be enjoined from making any regulations whatsoever regarding parking because whatever they decide is guaranteed to be a total goat f--k, er, epic fail. There s enough going on in this country that we shouldn't have to be spending our energy fighting our own local government.

City Council: admit that you blew this one. Repeal it.