I will scream this from the top of Mount Everest. I will climb to the top of The World Trade Center and shout it to the masses on Broadway below. The Eiffel Tower in Paris, France will not escape my roar. I Love Cookies1x I love cookies especially when there is chocolate in them. I hate being told that cookies are not good for me. I hate thinking about fat content. I don't want to know about cholesterol, and please, please don't mutter about carbohydrates. I want to eat my chocolate cookies without guilt and without glances from people around me.

What's with the guilt trip? People are naturally drawn to sweet things from the time they are born. My friend Goldie was feeding her four-month-old son. He had just graduated from a milk diet to pureed foods. "Watch this," she said to me. She put some strained peas in her son's mouth and he instantly spit it back at her. This went on a few times. I held a dishtowel in front of me as I observed. Goldie then put some pureed bananas on a spoon and her son ate it. Swallowed it and everything. All right, strained peas may not be very tasty, but it isn't so bad as to spit it out. Goldie told me that this went on all the time. Her son would rather eat something sweet than something not sweet. I can understand that.

And now, after years of eating all this sweet tasty food, we're told that most of it isn't healthy and we should try to stop eating all the sugary things that we love. Why is it so surprising that people find a hard time giving up cookies and candies? What is a person with a major sweet tooth supposed to do? Give them up? Try again.

Instead, I started to prowl my local grocery store. There had to be something that was healthy and would still satisfy my aching sweet tooth. To my great surprise, I actually found a few things. Did you know that there is ice cream out there that is not only low in fat but fat free? Did you know that there are ice pops out there that are not only fat free but also have only 15 calories in them? Did you know that there are fat free cookies out there that taste like chocolate ... almost? I knew that too, but I never bought any up until now. Yeah, they're kind of expensive, and yeah, you definitely have to watch the calories, especially on the cookies, but, when the sweet tooth calls, I have to answer.

Of course there is always the really healthy, naturally sweet food: fruits. Apples, peaches, plums, oranges, and Goldie's son's favorite, bananas. It's hard to get some fruits in the winter except for apples but when summer comes around, fruit can be a sweet lovers staple.

It's no fun having a sweet tooth in these days of healthy eating. Years ago, we didn't know all there was to know about the bad things that sugar and fat can do to a person. But, help is out there if you want to be a little healthier. A little bit of guilt free cookie eating. I wonder if all the cookie monsters know about this?