So CNN runs these occasional articles on healthy eating, and they’re just about always inane, like today’s article on “food pairings.” To wit:

DO mix grilled steak and Brussels sprouts

“It’s always best to cook meat or fish at low temperatures until it’s done,” says Kristin E. Anderson, Ph.D., a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health and Cancer Center, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “And if there are burned pieces, trim them off.”

So apparently “cruciferous” vegetables (members of the cabbage family, by and large) help the body eliminate potential carcinogens found on charred meat. That’s fine. But Dr. Anderson’s solution, don’t cook over high temperatures, is hilarious. You shouldn’t cook over high heat, so cook over low heat? So now what – no more Maillard reactions?

Here’s a tip: Don’t overcook your food. Two to three minutes over high heat gives you a nice crust and no char. Just make sure that if you invite Dr. Anderson over, you poach her steak to a nice soft gray instead of grilling it. Yum.

DON’T mix coffee and breakfast cereal

Most cereals sold in the United States are fortified with iron. … Problem is, if you sip coffee while eating your Wheaties, polyphenols, an antioxidant in coffee, can hamper the body’s ability to absorb the iron.

The article says black and herbal teas also have high levels of polyphenol. That’s as may be, but the article omits a pretty major problem: The calcium in the milk you put in your cereal has the same effect as the polyphenols, binding with the iron in the cereal and dragging it right out of your body. (Here’s a PDF version of a brief article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, saying the same thing in fancier terms.)

In other words, the tea I am drinking with my breakfast cereal now isn’t doing anything more than grabbing the sloppy-seconds of iron that the calcium in the milk left behind. And by the way, if you take a multi-vitamin with iron, it probably has all the iron than your body needs in a given day, so say nothing of the iron you might take in via red meat, legumes, or figs. Just don’t take a calcium supplement along with that multi-vitamin.