As an eating machine I'm driven far more by taste than by nutritional considerations. After all, one of my all time favorite dishes is Tung Po Pork, a Chinese concoction that consists mainly of pork fat and skin that is stewed in spices then steamed for several hours. That's why I was surprised to find myself interested in a flyer I got from The Nutrition Action Healthletter. Maybe it was the title that caught my interest. Here are some excerpts from the flyer. 1. Quaker Oats 100% Natural Cereal. This overrated granola cereal's ten g of fat per half cup serving make it high in fat compared to other cereals. And, despite the crunch, it's not high in fiber. A much better choice would be a low fat, whole-grain cereal like Kellogg Nutri-Grain Wheat, Post Grape-Nuts, General Mills Wheaties, or Nabisco Shredded Wheat. 2. Contadina Alfredo Sauce. A typical four ounce serving contains 34 grams of fat++20 of them artery-clogging saturated fat. That's like drowning your pasta in more than a third of a stick of butter If you want a good bottled pasta sauce, try Enrico's Spaghetti Sauce No Salt Added, Tree of Life, or Colavita. 3. Nissin Chicken Cup O' Noodles. It will give you a surprisingly strong shot of fat (about 3 teaspoons' worth) and almost as much sodium (1, 700 mg) as you should ideally eat in a whole day. Try The Spice Hunter Quick and Natural Soups instead. A serving averages just half a teaspoon of fat and 200 mg of sodium++a much healthier alternative. 4. Taco Bell's Taco Salad with Shell. With the shell, this platter of beef, cheese, and beans has 14 teaspoons of fat, more than 5 teaspoons of saturated fat, and 905 calories. That's almost all the fat and saturated fat an adult should eat in an entire day. If you're in the mood for a fast food salad, head to McDonald's. Its Chunky Chicken Salad contains a single teaspoon of fat and 1/4 teaspoon of saturated fat. 5. Swanson Great Starts Scrambled Eggs & Sausage with Hash Browns. This measly 6 1/2-ounce breakfast will slap you with more than half the fat you should eat in a day. And Swanson won't even say how much saturated fat and cholesterol it contains. You'd be better off skipping breakfast entirely. For a healthier microwave morning, have a Healthy Choice English Muffin Breakfast. At just one teaspoon of fat per serving and 15 to 20 mg of cholesterol (it contains egg whites, not yolks), it's a far "healthier" choice. 6. Oscar Mayer Lunchables. It would be hard to invent a worse food than these combos of heavily processed meat, artery-clogging cheese, and mostly white-flour crackers. The line averages 5 1/2 teaspoons of fat (that's 55 percent of calories) and 1, 517 mg of sodium. You'd get less fat and salt from two slices of Pizza Hut's Pepperoni Pan Pizza. 7. Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream. Gourmet ice creams like Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's are loaded with grease. A one-cup serving has as much artery-clogging saturated fat as 1/4 cup of lard. Choose an ice milk like Breyers Light and you'll cut the fat by 75 percent. Buy Sealtest Free or Edy's or Dreyer's Fat Free and you'll get rid of almost all the fat. 8. Campbell Chunky Soups. They're brimming with salt. An average 9-ounce serving contains 975 mg of sodium. That's half your quota for an entire day. If you're looking for more than salty water, check out Pritikin Soups. A cup has 160 mg of sodium and less than one gram of fat. That's a bit less fat-and far less sodium than you'll find in Campbell's Healthy Request or ConAgra's Healthy Choice Soups. 9. Swanson Hungry Man Turkey Pot Pie. If you think that turkey products are always lower in fat than foods made with beef or pork, you're wrong. Crammed into a single pie are 650 calories, 36 grams of fat, and 1, 470 mg of sodium. That makes it worse than Swanson's Hungry Man Beef Pot Pie. 10. Stouffer's Entrees. Despite their popularity, Stouffer's en- trees get a greater percent of their calories from tat (440 percent than any other major line of frozen dinners or entrees. Not one of Stouffer's 52 varieties meets our criteria for a "healthy" frozen meal. If you want low-sodium, low-fat frozen meals, try Tyson Healthy Portions, Healthy Choice Dinners, or Le Menu New American Healthy. From the Nutrition Action Healthletter,

we found in an entire Banquet Vegetable Pie with Chicken were twelve peas, 1/11 of a carrot, and 1/12 of a potato. And in a Lean Cuisine Glazed Chicken with Vegetable Rice, you'll find just 1/3 of a mushroom, 1/2 ounce of green beans, and a teaspoon of onions. That's it for vegetables! Need more whole grains in your diet? Don't count on Wheatsworth Stone Ground Wheat Crackers, with less than half a tablespoon of whole- wheat flour in four crackers. And Prego's "made with Fresh Mushrooms" Spaghetti Sauce has only about half a mushroom per serving ... that's three mushrooms in the whole jar! This newsletter appears to be a culinary Consumer's Guide with products reviewed by brand name along with "healthy" recipes (they cite Indian, Mexican and Asian recipes) and general tips for eating "healthy". The thing I got was a special promo++ten months of the newsletter for ten bucks or 17 bucks for 20 issues. As a bonus you get a couple of charts. One is called "Chemical Cuisine" and lists various food additives along with their relative safety. The other is a "Nutritional Scoreboard" that lists foods along with their relative nutritional values. I'm going to subscribe++for ten bucks how far wrong could I go? Oh yeah++if you don't like the publication, you can cancel at any time and get a complete refund. If'n you're interested, the subscription address is: Cspi/Nutrition Action Healthletter, P.O.