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

Basement Shennannigans

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Genocidal Vegetarians.

For those who don't already know, I don't eat meat. In fact I eat the absolute minimum of animal produce one could have without actually being vegan. There are three main reasons for this:

• Meat is, for me, unnecessary and expensive.
• Due to a genetic cholesterol problem animal products, particularly red meat and dairy stuffs, are bad for my health.
• I don't particularly like the damned stuff.

There are some veggie fascists out there who would hate and vilify any meat-eating human being. I'm not one of those and fortunately they're becoming rarer. It's not an ethical matter for me - if I had to eat meat to survive I would. Thankfully, I don't.

Hitler
Life is amazingly balanced. For every ridiculous veginazi out there there also seems to be an equivalent anti-veginazi. These are the rare people who think that a person who doesn't eat meat needs treatment, or to grow up. I'm going to call these the "carninazis".

The carninazis have a wonderful phrase which has been churned out to me on several occasions. I've even seen it on a t-shirt.

"Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian"

Really?

So?
To be fair, most people trot out this little phrase as a sort of joke. Bizarrely, though, some people actually take it seriously. Whilst anyone of average intelligence and a little time to sit and think will soon realise that this statement is irrelevant, the hard-of-thinking carninazi actually sees some connection between a distaste for meat and ordering the violent enslavement and death of an entire race of one's fellow human beings.

The List
Whether Evil Adolf was veggie or not is under discussion by historians, so it may not even be true. But, working on the assumption that it is true, I'd like to forward a few more names.

The following people, to the best of my knowledge were NOT or are NOT vegetarians:

• Benito Mussolini
• Joseph Stalin
• Mao Tse Tung
• Saddam Hussein
• Osama bin Laden
• George W Bush
• Richard Nixon
• Margaret Thatcher
• Kim Il-sung
• Torquemada
• Hernando Cortez
• Charles Manson
• Joseph Goebbels
• Herman Goerring
• Walt Disney
• The White Queen of Narnia
• Matthew Hopkins
• and Father Abraham!

So there! Nah-nah-ne-nah-nah!

Love,
Seán