Winnie the Poop

The other day, I saw a doctor on one of the network morning shows offering "fat-busting tips". The one that caught my attention was his recommendation to eat a container of Greek yogurt before every meal. The calcium in the yogurt combines with the fat in the rest of your meal to create soap; therefore, in the doctor's words, you'll "poop out soap" and thereby reduce your fat intake.

Several questions immediately came to mind:

• Is this guy really a doctor, or just some kind of twisted ass-freak?
• Could I scoop the poop-soap out of the toilet and use it for household cleaning?
• Is this why so many of the fancy soaps in the wellness aisle at Whole Foods smell like poop?
• If, like this doctor, my last name were "Oz", would I have an overwhelming desire to change my first name to "Thegreatandpowerful"?
• What other combinations of things could I eat and poop out as interesting concoctions?

It was this last question that really got me thinking. (Well, that and the cleaning idea; short answer is "don't even try".) And would I have to limit my consumption strictly to "food"? If I explored the introduction of saw dust into my diet, I could perhaps come up with the ultimate in recycled building materials.

As is my wont, after letting my mind run free for a few moments in pursuit of this concept, an entirely new tangent popped into my head -- where, all of a sudden, did "Greek" yogurt come from? When I was growing up, yogurt came in two varieties - Dannon or "from the health food co-op". It was, so far as I knew, all made right here in the U. S. of A. I remembered a commercial from years ago, where the Dannon people brought their yogurt to some remote village in the Ukraine where everyone lived to be at least 120, and those old farts glommed down the Dannon like it had spurted out from some curdled fountain of youth. Fast-forward to today, and in the supermarket there is about a quarter-mile's worth of frontage in the dairy case dedicated to different brands and flavors of yogurt. It comes in the traditional plastic tubs, but also in drink form, baked into snacks, and most perplexingly as something resembling toothpaste. However, the only kind I ever see anyone eating is the Greek stuff (usually Chobani, which is Greek for "someone is making a fortune here"). Most of the yogurt ads on TV (a surprising number, no?) are for one of the Greek varieties -- except for those ads with Jamie Lee Curtis where she, with an entire film crew in tow, accosts strangers whom she somehow senses are experiencing lower-intestinal distress. She encourages them to eat Activia three times a day, which will help them poop.

And... we're back to soap.