Sending out the Former and Welcoming the Latter; Good-Bye 2009!

Nope, not ladder--latter! And I don't know about you, but I always get a trifle confused when reading this phraseology and often, okay--always, have to return to the previous sentence (the former one) to figure out what they are referring to.
Say someone writes something along the lines of, "Sam ate eggs and bacon for breakfast. The former made him ill, the latter raised his cholesterol."
Which is which? Which raised his cholesterol and which made him ill? The Former--or the First item in the list, eggs, made him ill. The Latter, or the Last item, bacon, raised his cholesterol.

According to Mignon Fogarty, though, in The Grammar Devotional the terminology in general should be used rarely, if at all, in writing and never in speaking. You cannot refer back to the previous sentence with speech, so it makes it really hard to follow what you mean.

Making your readers work for the entertainment can lose the interest of the reader, especially if done frequently...so skip former and latter and use other methods of distinguishing between choices.

So, what is a preferable? Finding a way to avoid the need to use them altogether. Rewriting the sentence above could be done like this: "Sam ate eggs and bacon for breakfast. The eggs made him ill, the bacon raised his cholesterol."

Rephrasing it means less work for the reader, or listener, and therefore a more easily understood passage or speech.