Looking Out: Let us consider facts when making nutrition decisions

My beloved wife, Marsha, and I agree on nearly everything.

Everything except lettuce.

I prefer the cool, crisp taste and sweetness of iceberg lettuce. It requires little preparation time, as the inner leaves are nice and clean, protected as they are by the outer leaves. Also, it is very easy to smack the head of lettuce on the countertop to free up the stalky core, which is easily pulled out.

She prefers the darker green, more bitter and much-more-difficult-to-prepare Romaine lettuce.

Some who are reading this may say that I have intentionally biased the arguments in favor of iceberg lettuce. Of course I have.

Marsha’s argument has been extracted from the numerous articles she has read in health and nutrition magazines and websites. Plain and simple: Romaine lettuce has more nutrients than does iceberg.

Romaine lettuce is better for you.

We eat plenty of green salads and BLTs.

Even so, let’s lay out some data which I will make up out of thin air.

After all, making up your own data is a great way to win an argument. As Will Rogers said, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”

“Get your facts first,” said Mark Twain. “Then you can distort them as you please.”

Given those two bits of wisdom, I pledge to you that the facts I make up out of thin air will be some of the finest fake facts you’ve ever encountered.

Here goes. Exactly 0.5% of the nutrients I absorb from my food comes from lettuce.

Romaine lettuce has 14% more nutrients than does iceberg lettuce.

Doing the math, this means that if I exclusively switch to Romaine versus exclusively eating iceberg, I will be a smidgen more nutrient-rich than before. A smidgen is defined as diddly squat.

The problem is that Marsha does more of the shopping than do I. Since I am busy making up facts, I will add that even when we go grocery shopping together, she makes more of the lettucey decisions than I do.

This means that over the course of a year, we end up with 84.8% ragged bunches of dirty, bitter Romaine lettuce in our refrigerator and only 15.2% iceberg.

I counter this by slipping a head of cabbage into the cart.

I like coleslaw. A lot.

My Grandfather Whitehouse and my father were of like mind when it came to coleslaw. This proves beyond question that fondness for coleslaw is genetic in 93.4% of the cases studied.

Here’s a proven fact: Cabbage has more nutrients than lettuce.

This is really, really good news. It means that so long as I eat cabbage while being deprived of iceberg lettuce in favor of Romaine, I will not succumb to rickets, scurvy, goiter, beriberi or iron deficiency anemia. (Please note that I am not a medical doctor, so if you rely on this nutritional point of view, you may face certain death by moderate to severe beriberi.)

On rare occasions when eating out, just to keep my universe in balance, I order a wedge salad, which simply described is a huge quarter-of-a-head of iceberg lettuce sprinkled with bacon bits, some blue cheese crumbles, and bleu cheese dressing.

Note that I have used two different spellings — English “blue” and French “bleu.” This adds great credibility to manufactured data, don’t you know? Abraham Lincoln said that.

Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Let us consider facts when making nutrition decisions