Dietary Re-Education

Nothing deep and meaningful. This is more of a diary entry than anything else.

Most people who know me will, by now, know that I'm a fairly fussy eater. It's not that I'm finicky over mushrooms or something silly like that, it's that I eat low-fat vegetarian. Vegan, nearly!
The reason for this (again, as most people already know) is to do with cholesterol.

I have a genetically based tendency for my liver to make more of the "bad" (LDL) and less of the "good" (HDL) cholesterol than is normal. In order to combat this - and make sure that I can still climb stairs and enjoy sex over 50, without suffering a stroke or heart-attack - I avoid saturated fats in my diet as far as possible.

I've been using a fairly simple rule-of-thumb: if it comes out of an animal, it's high-saturate and BAD! The only two vegetable products to add to that are palm oil (which is environmentally bad too) and coconut oil. Nobody in their right mind would deliberately eat hydrogenated oils, but those are avoided as well. The only animal product I've been having is a drop of milk in my tea because, frankly, soya milk's a bit bloody grim.

Last night I began a little voyage of discovery. As it was a Saturday night I treated us to some chocolate to go with our wine. Okay, chocolate's very naughty but I reckoned it would be okay - plain choccy is vegan. It's got no animal fats and so should be okay.
Boy, did I get that wrong!

I decided to have a look at the nutritional info on the label: Fats 46%, of which saturates 29%.
That's 29% saturated fat, without so much as looking at a cow! My immediate thought, after bloody hell that's a lot, was how much more must be in milk chocolate.

This morning while shopping, I decided to do a little research. I compared milk and plain chocolate (with a shocked look on my face): milk chocolate has 19% saturates. That's 10% less than the vegan stuff! Bizarre!
I also thought I'd have a look at eggs - something I've been avoiding for (I thought) very sensible reasons. The saturated fat in an egg counts for 3% of its content. That's all! Three piggin' percent!
I'm coming to the conclusion that received wisdom = bullshit.

Later I blitzed the cupboards, checking everything I could lay my hands on to find out the saturated fat content. Some things are as I believed: cheese 22% (less than plain choccy!); butter 54%; fake veggie suet 34%.
Other things were a little more surprising: soya margarine 14% (nearly as much as milk chocolate); peanut butter 9% (3 times more than an egg); semi-skimmed milk 1%.

Weird and wonderful!
I've been making vegan porridge for breakfast to avoid the dangers of fatty milk. I've eaten Fruitus bars, which I now find have the same amount of saturates as an egg. I've eaten peanut butter sandwiches because I thought nut fats were completely non-saturated.

So what's going to change?
Well, there needs to be some more research, but while I'm doing that all chocolate's definitely off the menu, vegan or otherwise. I'm also going to remain vegetarian and eat a lot of fruit and greens, because that's natural for me - I don't like meat very much anyway. Cheese and butter are also still off, obviously.
But at the same time, I'm not going to be frightened to put a little milk in our porridge in the morning, or add an egg to our fried rice. I may treat myself to an occasional boiled (not fried!) egg - apparently it's safer than a peanut-butter sandwich. Possibly even a very occasional white sauce, if I can work out how to make it with olive oil instead of butter

Who'd have thought it!

Love and good dietary health,
Seán