There's some good stuff to be found in a pizza, like lycopene-rich tomatoes and calcium and protein from the cheese, but the sodium and saturated fat usually cancel out the benefits.
Time for a confession: The Sleuth's guilty pleasure is . . . butter. Sweet cream butter, no salt, slathered on crusty bread. But butter started getting a bad rap a few decades ago for its saturated fat, so diligent diners turned to margarine -- until it was discovered that margarine's trans fats are worse than butter's sat fats.
The Sleuth is a curmudgeonly sort who tends to think that if we were meant to get calcium from orange juice, cows would grow on trees. Or something like that.
We all know the best way to eat your salad is un-dressed (the greens, that is, not necessarily you). The next best thing is probably a light coating of olive oil and vinegar -- the Sleuth's preferred method, with a little Dijon mustard whisked in.
Chicken tikka masala may not be a true Indian recipe -- it likely was concocted in 20th century Britain to please Western tastes -- but there's no doubting that the bits of chicken in a spicy cream sauce are a crowd pleaser.
We can thank the tiny country of Belgium for at least three contributions to civilization: fine chocolate, the literary detective Hercule Poirot and the Belgian waffle.
According to some cultures, the tomato and not the apple was the fruit that tempted Eve in paradise. And if the warm, yielding, juicy flesh of a garden-ripe tomato isn't beckoning enough, scientists have discovered that the powerful antioxidant called lycopene is even more available for use by the body when tomatoes are cooked or processed.
Brown rice is a lot more nutritious than white rice, but revealing that inner beauty takes time -- about twice as long as it takes to cook white rice, which is brown rice with the bran and germ removed.
It used to be said that someone with a great sales pitch could sell ice to Eskimos. Perhaps the 21st century version should be hawking vitamin water to Americans.
Most Mexican food, at least as prepared for U.S. consumption, would never qualify as a healthful choice. But groceries and natural-food stores offer a quick, tasty and healthful option: the frozen burrito.
The Sleuth considers ''energy bars'' as the kind of processed pseudo-food that she does not eat. For portable protein, she tosses some almonds in a plastic bag.
Craving a panini but don't have time to go out of the office for lunch? Several frozen-food companies are promising that hot-off-the-grill taste from the microwave.
Dark chocolate got the scientific equivalent of a big, sloppy kiss back in 2002, when studies showed that substances in cocoa could be good for cardiovascular health. (Most females of our acquaintance could testify to the broken-heart-healing properties of chocolate, but who knew the American Association for the Advancement of Science would be interested?)
