Fashion people are getting diarrhea from eating too much kale, the leafy green vegetable that is allegedly trendy because it has lots of vitamins but actually trendy because it allows people to chew things without ingesting many calories. You can find "kale chips" -- which is like a potato chip made out of kale, and therefore nothing like a potato chip -- in many of the New York City neighborhoods where fancy people live. But the kale is not loving the fancy people back. The fashion people of New York are preparing themselves for Fashion Week in the middle of epidemics of the flu and the winter barfing bug, The New York Times' Tim Murphy reports. This has turned a close-knit group of people into paranoiacs suspicious that every colleague could be carrying debilitating germs. One way the fashion people have tried to build their defenses is by intensifying their kale diets. Murphy writes:

Others follow variations of what could be called the standard fashion-world starvation diet, whether it’s drinking large quantities of SmartWater fortified with packets of the vitamin supplement Emergen-C, or force-feeding themselves nothing but raw greens, like koalas munching eucalyptus leaves. Dr. Glatter says he has even treated some fashion people for diarrhea from eating too much kale.

The Times reports that fashion people are locking coughing assistants in closets and giving up the double-cheek kiss greeting. And yet it is this seemingly reliable and fashionable vegetable that has been their undoing.

(Photo via Associated Press.)

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Elspeth Reeve