Well, to borrow a phrase, there they go again! After more than two solid decades of being annoyed by runners and yuppie gymnasts smelling up elevators — little bottles of water everywhere, the biggest health binge in our history, W.G. Kellogg would be proud — the American public is being hectored for being lazy and obese!

And the statistics do show big weight gains, but the “lazy” part is just a lie. Washington has an entire “Joe Six Pack on the couch” mythos that colors its perception of the rest of the country. Now, these same Washington types long ago advised that we not depend on formal exercise programs, machines, and so on, but work exercise into our daily routines. Millions have complied — there are no empty stairwells in America now, people are indeed walking more, doing more laborious chores, for the exercise. But the latest government studies specifically omit these lifestyle changes and use only formal exercise programs to gauge how we’re doing.

To be blunt, the big fat finger goes onto the measuring scale, one mo’ time!

I returned to Washington, D.C. in 1984 from a six-year stint in New Orleans. Six years of popular New Orleans’ cartoonist Bunny Matthews’ depictions of very large people gorging on huge quantities of macaroni and foot-long pieces of French bread had attuned me to reality . . . a reality obvious to everyone around me there.

And so I went back to the land of the runners and guys who wear autumn worsteds in hot and humid August. And in Washington I encountered the hot new trend, the food pyramid. Unsupported by anthropological data, oblivious to the fact that humans have not acquired any extra, bovine stomachs, the powers that be had delivered a “food pyramid,” as the model for good dietary health. In this model, pasta and huge hunks of bread were damn near health foods. Unsurprisingly, the entire nation has begun to resemble the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, no matter how many visits to the gym or how many miles run.

Okay, stop. Don’t follow the leaders. Tear that chart off the wall and use it in the bird cage or as a liner for the litter box. Your mamma told you all that starch would make you fat, and she was right.

The new pitch is whole grains, still the “pyramid.” You only have one stomach if you’re reading this — you’re not bovine, you can’t live on that.

Does this mean throw out all carbs, an extreme diet? Well, 60 percent carbs — as currently recommended — is the extreme diet; we’re lucky to be alive from believing it. Believe what your body says, junk the pyramid. And oh, yes . . . I tried it and gained thirty pounds, the “healthy” way, three squares a day using the pyramid and staying at 1500 calories per day, low fat, lots of exercise . . . thirty pounds. Those pounds have been gone now for a decade, no special diet. The food pyramid is a special diet, specially constructed to make you and General Foods and General Mills fat, to make ConAgra fat, but not for your health!

So, I wasn’t alone, neither are you . . . just ditch the whole idea.

Pasta is not health food! Have a good day.