Food!

A member of my family who shall remain nameless has just been found to have raised cholesterol. He/she is very keen to control it by lifestyle changes rather than go on statins so we're working hard at cutting out foods that are high in saturated fat. Not, incidentally, foods high in cholesterol, like eggs and shellfish - have a look at this:

http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Healthyhearts/Pages/Cholesterol.aspx

Basically this says "the cholesterol found in food has much less of an effect on the level of cholesterol in your blood than the amount of saturated fat that you eat". So we're cutting out most dairy food (not much cheese except for a bit of goat/sheep cheese from time to time), particularly cutting out butter and full fat milk and yoghurt, and virtually all red meat that's farmed using conventional farming methods. So grass-fed beef is better than normal beef, and things like venison and pheasants and rabbits and hare and partridges are pretty certainly better than beef and lamb and pork. And fish - great.

Interesting article here about grass-fed beef: http://www.bulletproofexec.com/the-health-benefits-of-grass-fed-meat-part-2/

But it's not straightforward. You might be interested in this article:

http://www.webmd.boots.com/cholesterol-management/news/20131024/saturated-fat-less-harmful-than-thought

My take on all this is that food which is recognisable as food, apart from dairy, and isn't reared intensively is probably OK. What's not OK is to compensate for sacrificing butter by eating mountains of sweet things.

It's quite cheering that you can eat really well without red meat and dairy. But what has intrigued me is that there are plenty of cookbooks for low fat food but very few which simply focus on reducing saturated fats. Why? Anyone got any ideas?

Apart from all this, it's the old story - exercise is really good for you. Boring but true.