My sister said, "Did you know people who drink bottled water aren't getting the minerals they should."

"Yeah," I said. I figured there would be a problem. And that's it. The problem is when it comes to the things I ingest these days, I worry—am I poisoning myself?

I've actually become afraid of tap water. No, I've become afraid of food. From one day to the next, I read something or other about the horrors of various foods, and I'm truly getting paranoid.

I used to harbor the illusion that if I ate right and exercised, I wouldn't get cancer or colds or suffer from heart disease. I might even have whiter teeth and stronger bones.

But this January that idea went out the door.

My husband walks 4.5 miles a day and eats according to the rigid, heart-healthy Pritikin Diet. I'm talking plain brown rice and beans, salad without oil and no caffein. He doesn't drink or smoke (except for an occasional cigar), and he does yoga. You can't get more anti-disease acting than that. And still he wound up having triple by-pass surgery in January, and it wasn't one of those fraud operations. He really needed it.

The first time we went out to dinner after his surgery, he ordered grilled chicken plain, steamed vegetables and salad with no dressing, just a little vinegar. The waitress asked if he at least wanted marinara sauce on the chicken. No, he said. No salt, nothing except a little pepper. "It's fine," he said to me. I understood. He'd just had the fear of God put in him with this surgery. It makes one want to quit eating altogether.

Now to make things even weirder, there's my step mother, 99, and going strong. She can't hear well and walking is a little difficult, but her mind is good and she is, after all, 99. She thinks the meals at our house are weird. If she were still cooking, and you had dinner at her house, she would fix roast beef and potatoes with lots of gravy, bread with butter, and for dessert chocolate cake and ice cream. She ate that way her whole life. And she still is. In fact, we are making sure she gets plenty of fat in her diet to keep her weight up.

But that's the way I ate growing up. I love the morning smells of bacon and eggs and big fat buttermilk biscuits slathered with butter. We ate casseroles saturated with cheeses, green beans boiled with large dollops of bacon grease in the water for flavor. My grandmother who taught me all those wonderful cooking secrets lived well into her 80s and in good health. The words organic foods weren't even in her vocabulary.

OK, so what is someone like me to think? I really want to eat healthy. But the experts keep changing their minds.

For example, one day the nutritionists say don't eat nuts. The next they say nuts are one horse-healthy food. I even followed the eat-for-your-blood-type food plan for awhile. Those proponents say my blood type should eat beef and shouldn't eat eggplant or wheat or dairy. So I was eating beef more often, but I've been so conditioned against beef that I felt like I was putting something very bad into my body. So now I'm back to eating beef occasionally and eggplant more often.

My husband's fine now, working his way back to 4.5 miles a day, and he's even stricter about his food if that's possible. He's afraid to even smell salt. He eats salmon regularly. They say the omega 3 oils are good. But recently we heard that too much salmon isn't good.

No I don't have an answer. But I try to exercise. I take vitamins and eat right along with my husband, though not near so strict as he is. I guess we'll see what happens.

Sandy Sims is the editor of The Courier. Contact her at 408.200.1055 or ssims@svcn.com.