More than anything, middle age is annoying, and the reason is fairly simple. With age has come an increased awareness of the limitations of the human body, whether from the knee that creaks on the stairs or the inevitability of reading glasses.

Once I hit my late 40s, the reminders of my own mortality were everywhere. With alarming frequency I began noticing that people who turn up in the obituaries are my contemporaries. To avoid becoming one of those people, I now have a routine of medical screenings, checking for this and checking for that.

I also follow the news about diet studies with greater interest, although I am about as likely to follow medical recommendations for what to eat and not eat as I am to go bungee jumping. In my wholly unscientific opinion, there are two things wrong with most studies about healthy eating.

The first is that the recommendations often make the consequences of disobeying seem dire. In other words, if I ignore the advice, I may die. Being middle-aged and now acutely aware of my own mortality, this is something of an idle threat. Besides, if my days are numbered, I might as well eat what I want and like it.

The second problem with diet studies is that they contradict one another, and over time the dietary research community has lost credibility with the public. A lot of people gave up eating eggs in the ’70s because they supposedly carried lethal doses of cholesterol only to be told later that eggs weren’t so bad for you after all.

Consumers also were told at one point to avoid fat, and then the advice was modified to include only bad fat. As it turns out, margarine, which was touted as the healthy alternative to butter, really isn’t good for you after all. And so on.

In fairness to the scientific community, a lot of the confusion has been created by food marketers, who have spun research data to support the sale of light, low-fat and sugar-free products. Ironically, as this segment of the food industry has grown, so has the American obesity problem.

So, to my cynical way of thinking, the recent news that reducing fat consumption isn’t likely to lower my risk of disease was not shocking. According to an eight-year study of dietary fat consumption by older women, reducing fat intake to less than 29 percent of total calories, compared with a typical diet of 35 to 38 percent fat, did not produce the results one might have expected, given all the hype about healthy eating. This finding was dutifully reported last month in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

As diet experts chimed in on the report, no one seemed willing to say that the taboo on fried food had been lifted, despite the clear implications of the study. On the contrary, nutritionists continued to emphasize that reducing trans fats found in processed foods and saturated fats from meat and dairy products, combined with exercise, would help reduce weight and lower cholesterol.

This, of course, is obvious, as fatty foods tend to be high in calories. For most people, weight loss is a mathematical equation in which the calories burned are subtracted from calories consumed.

And the cholesterol problem can be solved with a pill – just ask my husband.

So what we consumers are left with is a vague sense of foreboding about what we eat but with little official reason to restrict our diets too severely. The sensible approach seems to be to eat what makes us feel healthy. Besides, at some point in time, a study will come along to validate our choice – at least for a while.