Nag!, Nag! Nag! Apparently Health Magazine, which called Smith Island Cake one of the nation's 50 fattest foods, wants us to have no fun.

Figuring that the summer is a time for travel and indulgent eating, the magazine picked a dish from each of the 50 states that could be bad for you. The choices were high in calories, loaded with fat, or served in gigantic portions. Smith Island Cake, recently named by the legislature as the official Maryland dessert, was the Free State's contribution to the list.

The take-home message from this report: Going on a road trip with the Health Magazine crowd would be a bummer.

Imagine a journey with them to Smith Island. You drive to Crisfield, hop on a boat for the ride over the Chesapeake Bay. You walk around the island, hoping the green-head flies don't eat you alive. You dine on some of the freshest, juiciest crab meat known to man. Then you say, "No Smith Island Cake for me because a serving has 26 grams of fat, which is about 33 per cent of my recommended daily allowance." Is this likely? We don't think so.

Yes, America has a weight problem. Yes we do tend to overeat, especially in the summertime. It probably says something about our psyche that we celebrate our nation's birthday by holding competitive eating events. Some of these endeavors, such as Nathan's International July Fourth Hot Dog Eating Contest, are televised from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam. What better way to honor America than to wolf down 68 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, a feat pulled off by last year's winner, Joey Chestnut?

Scolding about what we shouldn't eat does not seem to work. Conversely, compiling a list of the nation's forbidden foods can make some of them more attractive. Who knew, for instance that in Alaska there is an Eskimo Ice Cream that is made with berries and animal fat? Apparently there are two styles, the low-fat (9 grams per serving) version, which uses fish in the recipe, and the luxury version that employs reindeer fat, an ingredient that packs 91 grams of fat. If you are going all the way to Alaska to eat Eskimo Ice Cream, why wouldn't you go for the reindeer fat?

The South was not treated kindly by the magazine, which is published in Birmingham, Ala. The fried catfish of Arkansas, Alabama's bacon wrapped meatloaf, Louisiana's beignets, and the cherished corn dog of Texas were frowned upon.

In the Midwest oversized sandwiches — the BLT at Tony's I-75 in Birch Run, Mich., that used a pound of bacon, the Hardee's Monster Thickburger in St. Louis, Minnesota's Dairy Queen FlameThrower Grillburger — got the magazine's thumbs-down.

All the fault finding that goes with drawing up a list of 50 bad foods seems to have taken a toll on the finger-waggers at Health. By the time they got out West, some of their bad foods picks were not that naughty. The Utah scone, which is a version of our fried dough, registered a mere 6 to 8 grams of fat. In Wyoming the culinary criminal was the fatty lamb chop. All crime, as Durkheim told us, is relative.

As for Maryland's Smith Island Cake, there could be a quarrel about the numbers. Health says it has 26 grams of fat per serving. Another analysis of a cake using the recipe of a noted Smith Island cook, the late Frances Kitching, had 29 grams of fat. But when you are talking about a recipe that calls four cups of sugar — two for cake, two for the frosting — is fat really the dominant concern?

The cake, usually in nine or 10 layers with frosting in between, is very sweet. It was created by Smith Island women as a treat for their husbands who had spent a hard day working on the water. You burn a lot of calories hauling crab pots in and out of a boat. Nowadays not many cake eaters perform that kind of physical labor.

So if even after this bit of bad press, you crave a piece of Smith Island Cake, we recommend cutting a thin slice. Then after eating, doing a dozen sit-ups.