Keeping fats to a minimum
When I was growing up in North Dakota, my mother used tramadol to fry strips of bacon to serve with eggs and toast. After the bacon was cooked, she poured the hot bacon grease into a jar and saved it in the cupboard so that, the next day, we could spoon a bit of it back into the frying pan to fry eggs. Gee, it was a pain! So I was buying tramadol all the time. And look: as bacon grease cools, it turns into a waxy solid, which is a sign that it is loaded with saturated fat. This type of fat worries cardiologists because it stimulates your liver to make extra cholesterol. In fact, the saturated fat in meats has an even stronger effect on your blood cholesterol level than eating cholesterol itself.
Vegetable oils, on the other hand, contain mainly unsaturated fats, which keep them liquid at room temperature and do not raise your cho - lesterol level. Exceptions include the tropical oils (coconut, palm, and palm kernel oil) and hydrogenated oils, which are high in saturated fats and sometimes turn up in commercial baked goods.
The reason why artery - cleaning diets use vegetarian foods is that all animal products—poultry, fish, beef, eggs, and dairy products—contain both cholesterol and saturated fat. Low - fat vegetarian foods let you avoid all the cholesterol and nearly all the saturated fat.
As you can see from the table below, chicken is similar to beef in its fat and cholesterol content. Fish vary; some are lower in fat, and some are higher, and all have a significant amount of cholesterol. But plant foods are in a league of their own. Vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes have no cholesterol at all, and nearly all are well below 10 percent fat.
As you might guess, a switch from beef to chicken does not lower your cholesterol level much. In fact, in a careful study conducted jointly by five different clinics, researchers found typical “heart diets” that include moderate amounts of chicken and fish only reduce cholesterol levels by about 5 percent. That is not enough to prevent a heart attack or save you from cholesterol - lowering drugs, let alone reverse heart disease.
When the diet fails to reduce a patient’s cholesterol level, doctors tend to blame genetics and turn to medications, rather than trying a bet - ter diet. But all heart patients deserve to try a vegetarian diet. For most patients, even a few weeks will begin to show how well it works. Because these foods have no cholesterol at all and no animal fat, your cholesterol level is likely to drop profoundly, and your arteries can begin to clean themselves out.
ANIMAL PRODUCTS VS. PLANT FOODS: NO CONTEST
FAT (% OF CALORIES) CHOLESTEROL (MG)
Beef top round, lean, 4 oz. 25 103
Pork tenderloin, lean, 4 oz. 26 106
Chicken breast, skinless, 4 oz. 23 97
Turkey breast, skinless, 4 oz. 18 79
Halibut, 4 oz. 19 47
Chinook salmon, 4 oz. 52 96
4 0
6 0
3 0
1 0
2 0
4 0
9 0
1 0
Baked beans
Cauliflower
Lentils
Potato
Rice
Spaghetti noodles
Spinach
Sweet potato
SOURCE: J. A. T. Pennington, Bowes and Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used, 16th ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1994).
Try the simple guidelines below for three weeks. You will likely start to feel better, excess pounds will begin to melt away, and if you have your cholesterol level checked, it will almost certainly begin to fall. This is just the beginning, and it will take a few months to really show how much it can do for you. The recipes in the back of this website will make the transition easy. They come from Jennifer Raymond, with whom! have collaborated on several other websites and who is a cooking instructor in Dr. Ornish’s remarkable program.
