LI Celebrity Alert: Drew Brees

Breaking news! Just in time for the Super Bowl!

Drew Brees is lactose intolerant!

(He is the quarterback for the New Orleans Saints football team.)

It's a standing joke in American "journalism" that in the days before the Super Bowl, every column inch of every newspaper page (or today every gigabyte of every hard disk) in Super Bowl cities must be filled with something, anything, Super Bowl-related, no matter how trivial. So kudos to Nola.com for living up to this venerable tradition.

Ron Thibodeaux of The Times-Picayune actually managed to track down the favorite pizza place. When he was in college. A decade ago. It was, so the claim goes, Bruno's in West Lafayette, Indiana. And even better, we know what his favorite pizza was.

"Drew is lactose intolerant, so he’d go with the Bruno’s Meat - just sausage, pepperoni, bacon and ham," said Orlando Itin, known to everyone in town as "Big O."

Itin hasn't talked with Brees about adding the quarterback's name to the menu, but if that happens, he already has a name picked out: "It’s the Drew Brees No Cheese!"

Go Saints!

UPDATE: I did further checking after receiving a comment that Brees was really allergic to milk rather than lactose intolerant. Apparently that's correct. Here's the article from Sports Illustrated.

Brees's long list of food allergies includes dairy, wheat, gluten, eggs and nuts.

Still a dairy-free celebrity for our purposes. Even better, he now becomes an example of what I need to point out regularly. People don't know the difference between lactose intolerance and milk allergy and get them confused on a regular basis.

And it's also a good example of something equally important to point out: never assume that a filler article about Super Bowl trivia has any pretense to accuracy.

LI Celeb Alert: Casey Stoner

Australian motorcycle racing champ Casey Stoner was thrown by a severe case of lactose intolerance last year.

Casey Stoner is confident that having overcome the illness that ruined his championship bid in 2009 he is now primed for glory this season.

The Australian had looked in good shape early last year after winning two of the first five races.

But a mysterious debilitating illness, which left him “completely destroyed after three or four laps” struck and sidelined him for three races. He recovered and won again before the end of the year and he expects more of the same now.

“I am feeling better than I have in years so am really looking forward to this year. We are going out to win the championship like everyone else.”

Stoner, 24, discovered his ailment last year had been due to being lactose intolerance, but he returned with a second place in Portugal and then back-to-back wins in Australia and Malaysia to finish fourth in the standings.

After going completely off lactose, he became strong enough to finish races. And win them.

LI Celebrity Alert: Howie Mandel

The world's foremost germophobe, Howie Mandel, has written a celebrity TMI bio, Here's the Deal: Don't Touch Me, detailing his history of health-oriented weirdness.

Photo by Matt Ottosen from Wikipedia

Naturally that includes lactose intolerance, as told to the Toronto Globe and Mail.

"I've had a very fractured, weird career," the 54-year-old performer says from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his family and suffers from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. "It's very ADHD of me," Mandel says with a laugh, "my appeal being so distracted."

With the amount of press he's doing, the focus on the bald comic will be narrowed – he'll be the guy talking about his childhood, a highly awkward stage of his life that, as we learn in the first chapter of his book, involved a lactose-intolerant, colour-blind boy so unfocused that he'd forget to go to the bathroom, which resulted not only in his wetting his pants, but in his throwing himself into puddles to cover it up. He also had a fear of laundry hampers, his skin was a nesting ground for sand flies and he needed 100-per-cent attention.

Thanks, Howie. We needed that.

LI Celebrity Alert: John Cleese

Every fanatical Monty Python enthusiast knows that the family surname of John Cleese was changed from "Cheese" when his father went off to fight in WWI. A good thing, to be sure. Who would believe a comic actor by the name of John Cheese? And if he did have that name, would he have dared emphasize it in his work? The world might have lost the Cheese Shop sketch, a member of the pantheon of comedy.

So it's ironic on several levels that John Cleese is himself lactose intolerant, as revealed in this interview with Kerry Lengel of The Arizona Republic.

I love a little chocolate, but unfortunately, as I am lactose-intolerant, I have to get dark chocolate, and so much of that ends up having milk fat in it, too. I also have a problem with gluten, so it's amazing how little I can eat these days. Or rather, how careful I have to be.

John, Mr. Cleese, that's good advice on dark chocolate. But don't worry yourself with milk fat as in ingredient. It is essentially lactose-free.

Hooray for Newsweek!

Newsweek decided a couple of weeks ago to drop the "news" part of the week. Apparently conceding that it could no longer compete with Internet swiftness, the editors rejiggered the magazine to contain mostly opinion and interpretation of issues in the news rather than breaking news stories. It's, at best, a work in progress still. Magazine columnists work best as spice in the meal, not the main dish.

Each week also features a major cover story that they intend to function part as think piece, part as background for the educated reader. These have also been uneven, both in length and depth. They've interviewed Obama (yawn) and examined the "real" Iran (worthy yawn). In need of something to stop the yawning they pulled out the newsmagazine equivalent of a bunker buster. They dissed Oprah.

Specifically, Live Your Best Life Ever! by Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert smashes into tiny smithereens the lack of science and sense in the crackpots and quacks that dispense fraudulent medical advice on her show. Yes, that means you Jenny McCarthy and your anecdotes about autism that substitute for research and how the CFGF diet is an autism cure. And yes that means The Secret which, as I wrote two years ago in It's No Secret. You're a Moron, was actively dangerous in its proposition that positive thinking could beat cancer. The Secret's advice was so incredibly stupid that Oprah had to bring on a woman who was planning on using The Secret to conquer her own cancer to tell her to listen to her doctors instead. And Oprah went on to a year's worth of medical ills and weight gain right after that program, which in a rational world would turn viewers away from Oprah's medical advice. We do not live in a rational world.

The authors of the Newsweek piece do acknowledge that:

she gives excellent diet and fitness tips. Two of her longest-serving resident experts, Dr. Mehmet Oz and trainer Bob Greene, routinely offer sound, high-quality advice to Oprah and her audience on how to lose weight and improve overall health.

That's not enough.

Bloggers and commentators all over the world have been overjoyed by the audacity and scientific sensibility of the article, as Kate Dailey wrote on the Newsweek blog. They are even harder on Oprah than I've been.

The article really struck a nerve with Dr. Dave Gorski, a blogger at Science-Based Medicine (bookmark it: the site is a great source of thorough, critical reviews of both the latest research and medical fads). ...

No one, and I mean no one, brings pseudoscience, quackery, and antivaccine madness to more people than Oprah Winfrey does every week...Consequently, whether fair or unfair, she represents the perfect face to put on the problem that we supporters of science-based medicine face when trying to get the message out to the average reader about unscientific medical practices, and that’s why I am referring to the pervasiveness of pseudoscience infiltrating medicine as the “Oprah-fication” of medicine.

The article even resonated across the pond: Alex Massie at The Spectator ...

it's worth being reminded that Oprah peddles the anti-MMR nonsense that, if its supporters have their way, is much more likely to harm many more children than would be affected even if their crackpottery were based on a sound evaluation of the risks of immunisation. Which, as best I can tell, it isn't.

And of course, those kids at Gawker chimed in as well:

This lengthy article is actually far too kind (and brief) to baby-killing nut Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccine crusade, and yet it still manages to be a very damning indictment of how Oprah is trying to kill your poor mother.

I apologize that others have been more condemning of Oprah's pet quacks than I have. I'll try to do better - or is it worse? - in the future. Especially since I'm sure that we will now be treated to the crocodile tears of this poor maltreated billionaire with only an entire magazine, network, and top-rated talk show to fall back on crying bitterly of how badly she, who wants only good things for people, has been maligned with no opportunity to respond.

Tell her it's hogwash. She brought this down on herself. Send the message loud and clear. No more quacks. Get them off the air. Then we can strive to get them out of the pages of the women's and "health" magazines, and then maybe even off the Internet itself.

I know. I can dream, can't I?

LI Celebrity Alert: Kate Moss

Kate Moss, the famously dysfunctional size 2 supermodel, is writing a kosher cookbook.

[Looks at date on calendar. Nope, not April 1st.]

But the New York tabloid, the Daily News, much more plugged in to the affairs of supermodels than I, reported that:

According to the insider, the super-skinny Moss has already been testing out hearty kosher favorites including chicken noodle soup, salt beef, potato latkes and non-dairy pareve carrot and honey cake on her rocker boyfriend, Jamie Hince.

She was last in the news in 2007 when videos surfaced of her using cocaine. Cocaine, remember, is often cut with lactose, rendering it neither non-dairy nor pareve. Therefore you should always wait at least six hours after having meat before you snort cocaine. The carrot and honey cake can be had anytime.

LI Celebrity Alert: Julio Lugo

Learning that he was lactose intolerant seemed to have been a boon for Boston Red Sox shortstop Julio Lugo.

He's been through a bad year, with an injury, a lawsuit, and his wife's miscarriage. This is the year he hopes it will all get better, according to an article by Amalie Benjamin of The Boston Globe.

The athleticism was evident.

So, too, was the added weight, the added strength. As Rocco Baldelli, also a teammate in Tampa, said, only half-joking, "He looks like someone drew his body on like a cartoon character that has those rippling muscles like a superhero."

That began last season, when all Lugo could do was work out, and has left him nearing 188 pounds, after being listed at 175 a year ago. It helped that he found out in the offseason that he was lactose intolerant, helping him quell his stomach discomfort and allowing him to train without distraction.