Rep. Cannon’s Milkshake Diet— it’s chocolatey goodness

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) was several months into a diet when he was walking through Reagan National Airport to catch a flight back to Salt Lake City.

Man, was he famished.

Cannon didn’t want tacos. Or cheeseburgers. He didn’t know what he wanted. Then he saw the pearly gates of Maggie Moo’s, an ice cream parlor where he ordered a heavenly chocolate milkshake.

Thinking he had blown his diet in the worst of ways, the congressman was surprised by how good he felt after — no sugar spikes and lows as one might expect from such a treat. He felt good all the way home, not needing to eat airplane food or dinner once he arrived.

Cannon, 57, is no ordinary dieter. In the last year he has lost 30 pounds and hopes to lose 30 more. He fluctuates between 204 and 210 pounds and is considering buying suits a size smaller for incentive. Much to his chagrin, he suspects he may have to give up the milkshakes he blends four to five times a week in his office where he has a blender and Dreyer’s chocolate ice cream.

Cannon explains that a chocolate milkshake could be good for you. The glycemic index in premium chocolate ice cream, he says, is lower than bread — ice cream can be 5-6; bread ranges from 50-90. “If you eat fat you don’t get that spike,” he says.
At any given time he takes roughly 30 supplemental vitamins — the supplement industry is huge in his district. Among his favorites are Vitamins D and E, green tea and chromium picolinate.

Instead of three meals a day, he eats six. He discovered that Vitamin C is not good for him because of a gene that causes him to store excess iron.

“When I take one Vitamin C pill, one molecule causes 100,000 free radicals of iron to float around your system, so I feel crummy,” Cannon explained over lunch at Hunan Dynasty on Capitol Hill last week.

He also spoke about the poll that made him run for Congress, immigration, healthcare and why former Massachusetts governor and fellow Mormon Mitt Romney is better off (for now) without his endorsement.

“The last thing Romney needs is a bunch of Mormons saying elect him,” Cannon says. “Romney doesn’t particularly want my endorsement. I’m very supportive of Mitt, but I haven’t come out and endorsed him. Giuliani is a great friend of mine, and by the way, I like Fred Thompson too and Newt and I were pretty good friends.”

The congressman is compact with teddy-bear features — small eyes, round head, barely discernible neck, and wavy brown hair (with white at the temples). He is not tall — 5-foot-10.

Like former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he uses a stand-up desk in his office. “Life is tiring,” he says. “Standing is reinvigorating. Nothing more invigorating than standing at my desk for five minutes and no one bothering me.”

Cannon is a mixture of warm and gruff and cerebral — some might say wonky. He delights in statistics and facts and drifts into lengthy explanations for why things are the way they are.

He’s not an emotional man, but his emotions — anger, particularly — come out when he discusses the daughter who died of clear cell sarcoma of the soft tissue, a rare form of cancer two and a half years ago. Observers note that he lost some of his bombastic personality when he lost her. They say he’s less prone to spouting off than when he first arrived in Congress.

“I’m not an emotional kind of person,” he says, noting how hard it was for him to deal not only with her death but with the well-wishers who wanted to talk about it. He left Congress for five months during that time. To the well-wishers he says, “I don’t want to talk about it,” though he adds that he appreciated their sentiments.

Cannon has six daughters — he always counts the one who died — and two sons. He talks about how senseless her death was, how they were at the mercy of “idiot” doctors who could have saved her had they had the foresight to determine sooner what was wrong with her. “Doctors think they are God and don’t have to think,” he says.

 The congressman recently met Andy von Eschenbach, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and had a “fascinating talk” about technology in medicine. “I personally think we could have 50 percent improvement on the investment in finding causes and cures for diseases,” he says.

Cannon is decisive in speech. And decisive in ordering food. He’s a regular customer, and the waitress instantly recognizes him. “Sushi, right?” she asks. There is no dawdling. The lawmaker orders beautiful slabs of tuna and salmon sashimi, plus Mongolian lamb, plus a cup of sweet-and-sour soup. His guests order General Tso’s chicken.

I assume we’ll be sharing.

Cannon’s sashimi arrives and he offers some to his guests before diving in. He’s fairly adept with chopsticks — knows how to use them, how to talk while using them, how to plow through several plates of food without the wooden sticks slowing him down.

The congressman is not piggish but swift. After tucking a paper napkin into his trousers, he goes to work on the soy sauce and wasabi blend. He takes a miniature snowball of wasabi (some weaker people might have trouble breathing after such an amount) and drops it in a saucer of soy sauce. He takes the chopsticks and slowly, methodically, he blends. He’s talking healthcare and Petri dishes, so the scene fits.

Next he takes a large piece of tuna and holds it securely in the chopsticks suspended over his soup while taking his time making a leisurely point. He is not consistently expert with the chopsticks: At one point a slab of fish drops into his soup. He quickly fishes it out and eats it — no harm done.  

Back to policy. On immigration, Cannon believes voters ought to decide but says “there’s not a proposal on the line that I support.” He posts his views on his blog and has received 170 responses so far.

He wants a system that puts an end to illegal immigration. He is open to solutions short of citizenship for those here illegally; citizenship, he feels, should be reserved for those here legally.

Cannon came to Congress in 1996, two years after former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s (R-Ga.) Republican Revolution. He had not intended to run. As a fundraiser for the Utah Republican Party, he was searching for a candidate but no one emerged. He declared that if a poll gave him 10 percent name recognition, he’d run. “I had this horrible thought of [former House Minority Leader] Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) becoming Speaker of the House,” he recalls.

His name ID came in at 30 percent — he had a brother who ran for the U.S. Senate and lost, which he believes helped. Cannon, who had been running a steel mill with his brother, ran for Congress in a seven-way primary and won. He defeated the three-term Democratic incumbent by four points even though newspapers declared the incumbent victorious on election night.

Cannon knew the precincts yet to be counted were his. The picture of the day was Cannon, like President Truman, victoriously holding up newspapers that had announced his defeat.

Perhaps the recollection stimulates an excited appetite. “I’m porking out,” he says, suddenly conscious of the dwindling food. “You guys want any?”

Cannon graduated from Brigham Young University. He doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol or caffeinated beverages. Hot chocolate is allowed.

He once drank half a glass of beer thinking it was apple juice. When he was 11 he took a puff off a cigarette on the Fourth of July. “It was great,” he says. “I realized I like this too much, so I never did it again.”

He eyes the General Tso’s chicken across the table and asks, “Are you going to have more of that?”  

The congressman is among the most conservative members of the House; the American Conservative Union gives him a 100 percent rating. He’s diehard about keeping government small. He asks, “Why do we have a Department of Education?”

Cannon has a friendly rapport with some Democrats — some have been foolish enough to try to convince him to switch parties. He wonders if he’s on some shortlist of members Democrats want to try and switch, but he cannot fathom the hopelessness of their mission.

“I don’t laugh at them,” he says. “I do chuckle.”

He’s not the only member of his family to serve in Congress. His great-grandfather, George Q. Cannon, was thrown out in the late 19th century for polygamy; he had five wives.

When he’s not reeling off facts, Cannon speaks on earthly subjects such as the distinction between cursing, swearing, vulgarity and profanity. Under Mormon rules, he is forbidden to curse. He gets deeply offended when people use the Lord’s name in vain. He does curse occasionally, but won’t say which words.

The meal is over. His fortune cookie — “You have a friendly heart and are well admired” — is gone. He hopes the cookie is telling the truth. “I do actually care about changing things, about making the world a better place,” says the lawmaker.  

What else does he want to do in life?

He glances toward his spokesman, Fred Piccolo. “Yes, Fred,” he says, rolling his eyes in mock annoyance. “I’m staying in Congress. I will stay in Congress as long as I’m doing good there — and I have the luxury of deciding what good is.”

Still, Cannon admits, someday he’d love to mine coal. “I’d love to go out and make a lot of money,” he says, “but the fact is, the opportunity to move good things forward is very important to me.”