STEWING FOR FOOD FIGHT OVER NEWEST GUIDELINES.

Byline: Stephanie Becker

I'VE been starving for a good old-fashioned food fight.

I miss the days when meat was on the hook for its high cholesterol and cyclamates was a legal substance and Red Dye No. 2 was No. 1 in my refreshing beverage.

Well, now we've got a whole new brouhaha. The Centers for Disease Control has egg on its face after confessing that it was a little on the fat side when it came to the official death toll from obesity. Last year, it figured about 400,000 people died from being overweight. New calculations scale down that number to 25,814. Lethal flab went from the nation's No. 2 preventable killer to No. 7.

Talk about your weight loss.

Of course, that little tidbit did not go unnoticed by the restaurant lobby. A group called the Center for Consumer Freedom is gorging on the CDC's mistake. Its spokesman accused the CDC of having ``terrified the American public about their love handles.'' Then they peppered the nation's biggest newspaper with full-page ads to rub salt into the CDC's wounds.

Wonder how many calories there are in humble pie?

One writer suggested that whoever did the new estimates should get the Nobel Prize for mathematics. My personal celebration included just one more layer of Pepperidge Farm Milanos.

And that wasn't the only good news for my ``never missed a meal'' crowd. It turns out that packing on a few extra pounds may not be all that unhealthy.

Take that, Lara Flynn Boyle!

The official BMI rating - which is either your Body Mass Index or Bagels, Macaroni and Ice Cream Index - isn't really an accurate reflection of the risk your flab puts you at. Yet another study found that overweight Americans are healthier than ever because they keep their blood pressure and cholesterol in check.

OK, so that's like saying people with insomnia know the best beds because they toss and turn on them all night.

It's not the only beef I'm having with our food experts. Did you see the new ``Food Pyramid'' that the Agriculture Department just released? It looks more like a peacock feather fan than a government-funded pyramid schematic of caloric intake.

What happened to those cute little pictures of the building blocks of nutrition? I miss that tiny broccoli. Now it's like deciphering the Da Vinci Code. Every colored bar has to be cross-referenced to the mypyramid.com Web site with its smorgasbord of links to links (and none seem to be sausage links). By the time you navigate the site, you've lost 10 pounds from nervous energy and wrist aerobics.

Time to eat down another layer of the Pepperidge Farm Milanos.

And am I being paranoid or are the colors in the Food Pyramid suspiciously similar to the ones the Homeland Security Department uses for its risk-alert system? Red represents a severe alert and two cups of cantaloupe. Yellow warns of an elevated risk and those dastardly fats and oils. And green means low risk of an attack of the killer tomatoes.

Do government artists only get that tiny little box of 16 crayons? Has the ballooning federal deficit limited our color choices? I can just hear the Queer Eye guys screaming, ``Expand your palette! Go with that big box of 64 crayons! Use the magenta!''

And just one final morsel to stew on from yet another federal study. This one says that despite all the literature, only 3 percent of Americans follow the government's health advice.

Maybe we should be eating more carrots to read the fine print.