by Dr. Aronia Baker, N.D.

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Dear Famous Nutritionologist: Why are hydrogenated oils bad for you? And are they bad for me, too? —Sincerely, A Consumer of Fried Goods in Hazelwood.

Dear Reader: Hydrogenated oils are bad for your health because they contain hydrogen. Imagine your body as the dirigible Hindenburg. Now imagine filling that dirigible with hydrogen. What do you suppose happens if a stray spark comes too near? Do you see now why hydrogenated oils are the enemies of good health?

And when, in addition to the danger of spontaneous combustion, we add the danger of nuclear fission, we can see that hydrogen is not the sort of thing you want to be eating for lunch. Bikini Atoll is still uninhabitable today because of hydrogen, and similarly the inside of your refrigerator is uninhabitable today because of all the margarine you have stored in there over the years.

Fortunately, the food industry is at last beginning to take our health concerns seriously, and many delicious snack foods are now made with heliumated oils instead of the traditional hydrogenated versions. Foods rich in heliumated oils have the advantage of making you lighter the more you eat, so it is definitely a good idea to check the label before you make your next processed-snack-food purchase.

Dear Dr. Boli: I am admiring the “Gluton Free” labels on these shelves. How is it that one may eat food, yet without ingesting the glutons (as they have been separated from the food) he does not commit gluttony?  —Yours, Nearsighted in Whole Foods Market.

Dear Sir or Madam: The gluton, as students of quantum phenomena already know, is a subatomic particle whose spin and charge are responsible for the deliciousness of certain kinds of food, such as bread pudding or doughnuts, according to the Standard Model of subatomic cuisine.  Gluttony is the sin of excessive indulgence of the desire for food. By removing the glutons, health-food marketers remove the desirability of the food, thus making gluttony impossible. (Note that the similarity of the words gluton and gluttony is a mere coincidence; etymologically they are quite different, gluttony having come to us from an Old French word, and the gluton being named for its discoverer, Sir Theobald Glute.) Thus the marketers encourage us to eat food we do not enjoy, steering us away from the sin of gluttony and toward the still greater sin of apathy.

Dear Dr. Boli: I have on many occasions been forced to vigorously defend against hostile skeptics, my long held belief that at the end of every rainbow is a creel full of trout. Are you aware of any scientific evidence to refute this? —Sincerely, Clay Potts.

Dear Sir: The ends of rainbows have not been explored much of late, though several famous expeditions were mounted in the nineteenth century. The prominent Victorian spectrologist Hugo Pennybetter, whose success as a student of all things related to the rainbow is all the more remarkable because he was completely colorblind, explored a number of rainbows in South America in the winter (or, below the equator, summer) of 1877-1878. He was able to reach the ends of four rainbows, a record never equaled by any other explorer. At the end of the first he found a pot of gold, but only inferior 10-karat stuff that failed even to pay the expenses of the expedition. At the end of the second he found a unicorn, a gryphon, a chimera, a cockatrice, a sphinx, and a duck. At the end of the third he found a platter (not a creel) of trout, but (surprisingly enough) speckled trout, not rainbow trout. It is not known what he found at the end of the fourth, since, having found it, he refused to come back.