I WAS CONTEMPLATING the meaning of life over a lightly boiled egg when it occurred to me that scientists appear about to get rid of one of the scourges of modern civilization. I refer, of course, to the non-fat diet.

It was there, in big black letters in one of the local rags: "Denying Yourself Fatty Food May Not Be Good For You." So much for years of being told that the shortcut to the marble orchard is paved with French fries, ice cream and chocolate nut sundaes, with or without cherries on top.

A lady named Lee Hooper says a study she and her colleagues made of low-fat diets concluded that "the effect on overall mortality is essentially zero." Take that and stick it in your muesli.

This isn't the first time that medical science has decided that what was good for you day before yesterday and was bad for you yesterday is actually good for you again today. Booze gets a regular go-no-go, depending on whether the heart or the liver is under the microscope.

Actually, an alternating current of deification/demonization has long been a way of keeping scientific research in grants and other charitable largesse, largely tax-free. Radiation, for instance, was great for making watches glow in the dark, then not so great for turning people into large pus-balls, then great again for curing them of cancer.

There was aspirin, at first a godsend for those of us prone to hangover headaches - about 98.7 percent of everyone I've ever met. Then it was condemned for turning our internal plumbing into something that looked like the rats had got at it.

Now aspirin is glorified for its knack of stopping blood clots before we pop our clogs from heart attacks and strokes. Tomorrow, some scientific boffin is likely to tell us the stuff causes corns, accentuates drinker's droop and can lead to terminal B.O.

To be honest, I've not had all that much confidence in things that scientists get up to ever since I discovered they had spent a lot of time and dollars trying to train pigeons to guide ballistic missiles.

My suspicions about health claims for various foods stem from my 18th birthday, when I announced at the family dinner table that I had now reached the accepted age of adulthood, and that my first adult decision was to swear off vegetables for the remainder of my days.

Proscribed from my dinner plate since have been most things green (string beans, Brussels sprouts, broccoli), all plants yellow or yellowy-orange (carrots, squash) and things that just look awful, like cauliflower, which resembles a human brain that fell into the bleach, and oysters, which look like snot.

(The exceptions are lettuce, not really a vegetable at all, and anyway it makes cheese sandwiches crunchy, and black-eyed peas, which are really brown and beans and are a necessity for dinner with cornbread, hominy, sugar-cured ham and banana pudding.)

Anyway, back to Lee Hooper's good works. She and her colleagues at the University Dental Hospital in Manchester, England, (well, I suppose dentally trained folk should have a pretty good handle on alimentary matters) analyzed the eating habits of about 30,000 people, which would seem a fair cross-section.

What they claim to have found was that people may be depriving themselves of tastier food for no good reason and that they've gone a mouthful too far in their quest to be slim and healthy by throwing out fats that are good for the body.

I'm not going to get into this matter of "good" fat versus "bad" fat - it sounds like someone is splitting some obese hairs here - but it seems that the food fascists have sentenced us to eating stuff that looks like gravel or slabs of lard and tastes like damp gravel or pickled cardboard for no good reason.

Meir Stampfer, a chap up at Harvard's School of Public Health, puts it bluntly: "People have got the wrong message that fat is bad. They have the mistaken assumption that if you eat fat, you get fat, but this is not the case that a low-fat diet will lead to a low-fat person."

So I can now tell a pal named Kevin that cramming down some kind of luncheon spread that looks like the stuff that they stick between bricks to hold them together is a waste of time, not to mention a futile exercise in sensory deprivation.

As for yours truly, I've never surrendered to the food police and shall continue downing full-fat milk and not that skimmed mess that tastes like rabbit wee-wee, plus hearty helpings of French fries, avocado vinaigrette and grease-laden burgers (when my wife Elizabeth isn't looking - unlike the food police, she is to be feared).

There was a brief period, some years ago, when all this health food propaganda twigged a nerve or two. Then I took a longevity test that was heavily weighted on what sort of food you ate as a way of determining your prospective life span.

According to the test results, I had already been dead for eight years. I thereupon quit worrying about my dietary habits and so far have survived a heart attack, triple-bypass cardiac surgery, pancreatitis, diabetes, a couple of hernias and a cleft chin.

To be sure, I'm not running any marathons these days, but one doesn't push one's luck.

Meanwhile, I now am informed that folks up at the National Public Health Institute in Helsinki have found that there is a "significant association" between low cholesterol and severe depression in the cases of 111 men who committed suicide.

I've always thought that having to fork over a week's wages for a few shots of booze to get through a night that can last for months was responsible for the rather accentuated rate at which the Finns tend to top themselves.

Whatever, I'm not about to play an alimentary version of Russian roulette, so pass the mashed potatoes and sausages and eggs, please, and don't spare the double cream and the cholesterol.

Thought for the Week: If you're not the lead dog, the scenery never changes

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