Andy Rooney has always been pointless . . .

But here he does a public service by embodying a ubiquitous form of willful obtuseness. Rooney thinks he should ignore all the advice we hear about healthy diets because "they" keep changing their minds and he's always ignored them anyway and he isn't dead.

If I were you, I wouldn't even bother clicking the link because his essay is so banal, but it's good form to offer it. How this clown earns a salary is incomprehensible. Anyway . . .

"They" have refined "their" understanding of human nutrition over the years, just as our understanding of every area of biomedical science has advanced. But the only really major change that I can think of as far as dietary advice is that "they" used to emphasize a low fat diet, and it's now clear that the issue is not really how much fat you eat, but what kind of fat. Unsaturated cis-fats are good to include in your diet, because they slake hunger without causing a glycemic spike and can actually improve your blood lipid profile. Other than that, "they" have been recommending fruits and vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and if you must, lean meat since I was a child.

There have been two major sources of confusion. First, the official FDA recommendations were heavily influenced by lobbyists for decades, so they were somewhat unclear and they leaned against much of the scientific wisdom by promoting meat and being overly tolerant of junk food. In the latest incarnation, that has been fixed.

Second, there were a lot of hypotheses about the health benefits of nutritional supplements, particularly anti-oxidant vitamins, which have not panned out. So don't bother with the vitamin pills as long as you haven't been diagnosed with a deficiency. (Vitamin D supplementation is still controversial though it's looking less and less like a good idea for most people. Folic acid supplementation is a good idea for pregnant women who don't eat a lot of veggies, but it's now added to wheat flour so you're already probably getting it.)

Rooney may do a public service by providing the platonic ideal of an idiot, but he does a disservice if anybody is foolish enough to pay attention to him. Sugary drinks are a plague upon the land, shortening our children's lives and promoting an epidemic of diabetes that is starting to overwhelm the health care system. This is a public health disaster compared to which radiation releases are utterly trivial. Andy Rooney should be ashamed of himself.