Green beans with aubergine and coconut.

This is a recipe adopted from the ever-wonderful Hugh Fearnely Whittingstuff.  The reason for the adoption is this:  Hugh cooks in industrial quantitities.  I'm trying to find nice little vegetarian / cholesterol lowering recipes for one or two, so I had to adopt this to make it workable, which meant coming up with a couple of different ingredients.  So, I think I can add some value to that recipe although, of course, I'd love to try it out in the 'proper' quantities, one day.

Here's my picture of the green beans, aubergine and coconut while cooking.  It's quite pretty, even in the dour needs-updating ex-council-house environment of my kitchen.

Do, please, excuse the floor.  I know it needs sweeping.  I have a cat.  It always needs sweeping.  Eventually, you get to the state where it can't get any worse; a sort of fluff-ecology-equilibrium. Oh yes, and there's a splash of a tumeric based sauce in the top left.  IF I HAD SEEN IT BEFORE I WOULD HAVE WIPED IT UP.  OK?

Right.  From memory.  Whenever I specify an amount, please remember that what I really mean is 'some'.  All measurements are flexible.  If you are a physicist, you will understand this.  What is important is the error bar, but these, IMO, refer to orders of magnitude in recipes, so you can forget that for a bit (as I have).  So long as you stay within the order of magnitude specified by the recipe, you'll be OK, and you can adjust the second and third decimal places to your liking:

Ingredients

• One large aubergine or two medium / small aubergines
• One packet of green beans
• A handful of baby plum tomatoes or baby cherry tomatoes - about 4 oz or half a supermarket carton.  The riper they are, the better.  They need to be chopped so that each tomato is at least chopped in half, and chopped finer, if you can find the tuits.
• Around 50 g of solid creamed coconut - this is coconut that comes in 'tablet form' and is a boon for people cooking in small amounts who don't want to use whole tins of coconut milk.  Look at your packet weight for estimates, but 50g is probably about the size of a large walnut.
• Olive oil or corn oil - not ghee

You're going to have to make a paste for this.  Any extra paste can be frozen, as Hugh points out in his recipe.  I still used about half the paste to make a small curry.  As advised before, use fewer chillies rather than more and work up as you find the amount you most like.

Curry Paste Ingredients

• Thumb sized piece of ginger, if you have fat-man-sized thumbs.
• 4 - 5 shallots or a medium onion.
• 5 - 6 cloves of garlic
• heaped teaspoon cumin powder
• rounded / flat teaspoon tumeric
• rounded / flat teaspoon fenugreek (this makes it bitter, but it's OK - careful not to add too much, but fenugreek is terribly good at lowering cholesterol)
• Two stalks of lemongrass - also bitter - with the tough outer bits removed
• Two small apache f1 chillies, seeds mostly removed.  I grow these, and I think they're quite hot so two, even deseeded, are quite enough.  I would imagine that one thai birdseed chilli is enough.  If you are using dried chilli flakes (which you can), I'd go for a small, flat teaspoon rather than a heaped teaspoon of those. 

Method:

Whizz all the paste ingredients in a blender with a dessertspoon of water until they form a fine paste - I use a tiny blender I buy from Lakeland (I like it so much I replace it immediately it breaks down). 

If you can't fit all of the chopped onion or shallot into the blender, reserve about half of it to chop and fry later, before you add the paste. 

Chop the aubergine or aubergines lengthways so that you get about eight long pieces out of the aubergine and then in half so you have reasonable large chunks.  Heat some oil (two to three tablespoons) in a frying pan until hot and brown the aubergine pieces in batches in this oil until they are brown on most of their sides, they're hissing, and the oil is coming back out.  You may need to add more oil for each batch.  The aubergines absorbe oil initially but release it as they are cooked.  Alternatively, heat a griddle pan until very very hot and cook the aubergine pieces on that until they are cooked all over and start hissing. Let each batch of aubergine pieces drain and cool on kitchen paper to absorbe excess oil - you might have to stack the aubergines and kitchen paper two or three layers high.

In a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan, heat some more oil until its hot enough so that the air above it is wavey.  Add any left over onion and fry until golden brown; then add half of the paste (refrigerate or freeze the other half for later use) and keep frying, stirring all the time, until the oil starts coming out of the paste.  At first, the paste absorbs all of the oil, but starts releasing it when the vegetable matter in the paste is cooked.

Then throw in your pieces of aubergine, and stir until they are all nicely coated in the spice mix.  Then add your handful of chopped tomatoes and keep stirring until the tomatoes have pulped down a bit (say two to three minutes).  Remove the pan to a medium heat, or turn it down, and add the beans and about 100 ml (a small glass) of water, along with the walnut-sized piece of creamed coconut - if you have the time, mash the coconut up in 100 ml of hot water beforehand to make a faux coconut-milk.  Stir, until the coconut is completely melted, and then  turn the heat down to simmer, put the lid on the pan and let it stew for half an hour or until the beans are completely cooked. Add salt to taste.

You can freeze this if you don't eat all of it.

Spice up your life

See that picture?  That's an anti-cholesterol army, that is.

Reading around, it's harder to get cholesterol down by not eating things than it is by eating things.  So, while it is probably a good idea to avoid dairy and cut down on saturated fats (don't kill yourself if you have a bacon sandwich; just don't have another one tomorrow), what is more likely to work is making sure you adjust your diet to include stuff which does bring your cholesterol down.  All of the stuff in that picture above is, somewhere, rumoured to work to bring cholesterol down. 

Some of the rumours are actually backed up by research.  Oats, we already know about, and garlic (although some studies disagree) and red wine.  Suprising, green tea is one of the substances where the claimed cholesterol lowering effects are backed by research; green tea appears to be an all-round wonder-food when it comes to reducing / preventing metabolic syndrome.  I hate it. I try to drink at least one cup a day.

Spices, though: there are huge lists of spices which may lower cholesterol.  We're looking at anecdata here, and some spices are referred to more than others. 

Top of the list is fenugreek, or methi.  You can get it as a tea, or more interestingly, just use the spice in cooking.  It has a clovey/mapely flavour.  There are studies which show that it reduces cholesterol in animals.

Many websites state that there is evidence that cinammon may reduce cholesterol, although other reputable websites state that the evidence is weak. It can't hurt to use cinammon as a flavouring, though.

Similar cholesterol lowering claims have been made about tumeric: again, more reputable sites claim that cholesterol-lowering properties haven't been proven (although tumeric does seem to have some medical activity).

Similarly, ginger may have cholesterol-lowering effects.  One of the things I'm noticing is that substances that may lower cholesterol often appear to be insulin-lowering substances as well.

While chili peppers have only a small cholesterol-lowering effect, they may well prevent the oxidisation of LDL cholesterol, or lower the rate at which it happens, anyway.

Cumin, strangely, seems to have no cholesterol-lowering effect in rats, although it does lower insulin levels.

Anyway, do you see where I'm going with this?

It's easy enough to do your own research, but it seems to me that many of the spices used regularly in Indian cooking may be active in reducing cholesterol.  The evidence that increased vegetable consumption  (do your own cite) will bring cholesterol down is also compelling.

Vegetable curries are the way to go, my friends.  Jackfirecat and myself have decided to cook our way through Indian Vegetarian food and we'll be posting the results here.

Shag Gobi Aloo

This is one of the ways to use the roast cauliflower you've prepared according to the instructions in the last post.  It's based on this recipe by the Hairy Bikers; I've changed it a little, and you can change it a lot, putting in aubergine, mushrooms, tofu or whatever you want (I've tried all of these).  The key thing here is the spice mix and the rough method.  In a later post, I shall summarise what I can find on the internet about various spices and herbs and the various claims that are made about their cholesterol lowering and health affects.  Suffice it to be said that the spices involved in South Indian cuisine are probably the spices about which most cholesterol-lowering claims are made; some of them feature here (fenugreek, garlic, tumeric and ginger).

Ingredients:

A tray of roast cauliflower
A bag of spinach leaves (about 200 - 250 g)
Three or four egg-sized (or slightly larger) potatoes - I think this is best done with floury or 'old' potatoes rather than waxy or 'new' potatoes.
A tub (about 8 oz) of very ripe baby plum tomatoes or cherry tomatoes or similar*.
One onion.
Olive oil or corn oil**

Spices:

I'm giving rough proportions - adjust as you wish

Two teaspoons of black mustard seed
One teaspoon of fenugreek
One teaspoon of tumeric
2 cm cubed ginger, grated
Two cloves of garlic
Two small, hottish (fruity-hot) fresh chilli peppers (1 cm - 2 cm length), seeds removed
Teaspoon of dry chilli pepper or one dried chilli pepper 4 cm in length, seeds removed***
Salt
Pepper

Optional: a teaspoon of cumin or cumin seed or fennel - but the spices above are quite enough.

Method

You'll have roasted a medium head of cauliflower according to the previous method.  Do try not to eat all of it.

Put a splash of oil into a heavy-bottomed large saucepan, and let the finely chopped onion fry away on a medium heat.  You aim to get all of the water out of the onion, and the starch in the onion to caramelise.  This is very important.  The Hairy Bikers suggest adding some sugar - this is because anything vaguely tomatoey works better if the other ingredients are kind of sweet.  I'm not suggesting this because I'm suggesting that you fry your onions enough.  Most people don't do this.

Here's a picture of the stage where most people think that their onions are fried enough:

There's a few flecks of brown in there, to be fair, but this is just the beginning of the caramelisation.  Here's what the same onions look like when they have  been fried enough:

Just enough, that is.  To be quite honest, these could even do with two or three minutes more, with constant stirring.  Cooking the onions enough may well take twenty - thirty minutes, but it's worth the effort.

While the onions are cooking, measure and prepare your spices and set them aside.  I divide the spices I'm going to use into 'wet' spices and 'dry' spices. It is important that the spices are measured before the point that you use them, as you will need to chuck them into the pot in quick succession at the apposite moment.

The garlic needs to be crushed (or sliced finely), and the ginger needs to be grated and the dried chilli chopped if you are using whole chillies, but you only need to 'measure' the dry spices.

 I found some brilliant little bowls (75p from Tesco) and I use those for spices.   Here's a picture:

 I think I probably just like taking pictures of spices in tiny bowls.

Talking of pictures, I am so entertained by this idea of cooking my way through South Indian recipes for health reasons that I bought a massala dabba.  Here's a picture of that:

Anyway, back to the recipe.

While you are waiting for the onions to get brown enough (don't try to speed it up by putting the heat on higher, as this will result in some burnt onions and some not-cooked onions), peel the potatoes and cut them into  1 - 1.5 cm cube pieces, and halve the plum or baby tomatoes.

Once your onions are properly brown, turn the heat up to high (I am using an electric stove at the moment, so I move the pan onto a neighbouring ring that has been pre-heated to high) and chuck in first the dry spices, giving everything a good stir, and then the wet spices (they bring down the heat in the pan a little), also giving everything a good stir, and wait about a minute (if the spices start 'catching', then it's enough), stirring all the while, and then chuck in the potato cubes. 

Stir the potato cubes constantly for two - three minutes, so that they are all covered in the spices and oil.  Then throw in the tomatoes and stir some more for another minute or two. 

The next bit is the magic bit.  Return the pot to the medium heat and stuff in the whole bag of spinach (4).  The spinach will appear to try to escape and overflow your pot or casserole dish, but ignore that.  Beat that spinach down.  Add a minimal amount of water - 2 fluid oz or four tablespoons (and you probably don't even need to add that much) and put the lid on the pot and wait ten to fifteen inutes.  The spinach will wilt and reduce massively in size, releasing liquid as it does so.  The potatoes will cook in this liquid, and in the liquid released from the tomatoes.

After about fifteen minutes, take the lid off the pot, give everything a good stir, and chuck in the roasted cauliflower.  Replace the lid and let everything simmer along nicely for another ten to fifteen minutes, or until you feel that the potatoes are cooked adequately.  You'll find that your curry has developed a sauce!

I like to serve this with rice or naan and yoghurt - no need to make a fancy raita.  It's really delicious!  You might want to squeeze a lemon over it before serving.

Note: I have tried making this using aubergines instead of potato, at that stage - I think that the aubergines would have been better pre-roasted or fried, and treated like the cauliflower.  I have also used mushroom along with the potato, and similarly, I think those would have been better pre-roasted and treated like the cauliflower.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*We're not going to skin them - and the baby and small tomatoes are more flavoursome.  If your tiny tomatoes are almost going over, even better. 

**Olive oil is not traditional in Indian cuisine, but I like the taste of it in this.

*** Or just go for a small teaspoon of the dried chilli pepper you get in a jar or two fresh ones, or whatever.  The amounts here should really be 'some', and I do like it very hot.  I expect that half a rounded teaspoon of the dried stuff (not powdered) would really be enough - the dried stuff you buy in shops does seem to include seeds, whereas I'm saying in this recipe that you should take the seeds out and just use the flesh (because I think that gives a fruiter edge, but it's marginal) - but the seeds add a great deal of the 'chilli heat'.  Best to add less if you are in doubt, and move the heat up in a further cooking.  This is well tasty on its own, without the chilli heat.

(4) Take the spinach out of the bag, first, though.  Obv.

This is a song about cauliflowers. They keep ya regular

In my search for reliably (according to the research) cholesterol-lowering, or at any rate, cholesterol-not-increasing recipes that are tasty in their own right, I've come across a few curries with cauliflower.  Not all of the methods of cooking cauliflower are equal, but what I am about to describe produces a cooked vegetable of such lip-smacking gobberiooness that it should be declared illegal.  This can't be as good for you (or as not-as-bad for you) as it is, but it is, it is.

Roast Cauliflower

Ingredients

One head of cauliflower
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper

In addition - cumin, garlic, chilli.  This method of preparing cauliflower can handle any number of flavour additions, but really, all you need is cauliflower, olive oil, salt and pepper.  It's a good idea to try this without any additions first and then experiment later.

Turn your oven on to a medium heat - say 180 - 190 deg C, or the gas equivalent.  Break up the cauliflower into florets about 2 -3 cm across; if they are too big, chop them a bit so that there's a 'head' on each piece.  Put them into a bowl and give them a good splosh of olive oil (maybe about a tablespoon?), a good pinch of salt (I do use Maldon, but ordinary salt would probably do) and a good grind or two of black pepper.  Move them around the bowl with an apposite spoon until all of the olive oil has been picked up by the florets - it tends to get absorbed into the heads and you want every head to have absorbed at least some olive oil.  It will come out in cooking.

Toss the florets into a roasting dish (I'm sure a baking tray would do equally well) and roast for 20 - 30 minutes in the middle of the oven.  You want the florets to be substantially browned, maybe with some blackened bits.  Here's a picture of some I've done today:

(The picture's a bit rubbish, but you get the idea, particularly with reference to how browned it should be).

The thing was, this was a very small cauliflower, and the smell of the roast cauliflower is so delicious and the taste so brilliant that you can't help but eat two or three florets as soon as it comes out of the oven (although it's better to wait until it's cooled down a bit). That's why the tray looks a bit empty.

The roast cauliflower can then be added to Indian vegetarian curries or just eaten on its own.  I suspect it would puree very well if you were into doing that.  Although smoked  cauliflower puree, which I had once, is even tastier, this is pretty close to the vegetable pot-of-gold, in terms of something that's really tasty and chunky enough to form the basis of a dish.

That picture up there, by the way, has had a teaspoonful of cumin (jeera) seed added to the cauliflower before it went into the oven.  The smell was heavenly!  Seriously, try this.

Sweet potato au coconut milk

This recipe is based on Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall's Sweet Potato and peanut au gratin but adjusted so that the saturated fat comes from coconut milk, and so that the recipe contains, instead of peanut butter, tahini (which is basically ground sesame seeds) which apparently has cholesterol lowering properties due to the, er, 'phytophenols in it' (It's all a bit Daily Mail to me).  Wiki has more on sesame oil.  On the whole, sesame, whether in the ground or oil form appears to be a Good Thing.

See previous blog post for thoughts on coconut milk.  The original recipe is absolutely delicious, so this recipe is really just trying to recreate that deliciousness without the peanut butter and without the cream, so that it's a tad less cholesterol raising.  I'd really appreciate people trying this out and saying if they think it works - if it does, then I'm going to try using the coconut milk in other dishes where you'd normally use cream.

(I haven't fiddled with that picture at all, so it's probably not the best quality - but it's there to give you an idea of the size of the dish)

Ingredients

• About 1 kg of sweet potatoes - this is about two medium sized sweet potatoes, In My Mind **
• One tin of creamed coconut milk
• Sunflower, corn or olive oil (each adds its own flavour - I used sunflower which is probably the least flavoured)
• Garlic - a few cloves (three to four)
• Chillies - as many as you need to make four helpings of something mildly spicy.  This would probably be about one of those thin, curly chillies you can get from an Asian shop (see the picture at the top of that article).  Err on the mild side because you just need a little bite, not for the chilli to be the main show.  If you are worried about it being too hot, just use the red flesh and make sure you throw the seeds away.
• One lime (a lemon might do if you can't get lime)
• Tahini paste
• Salt

Procedure

Heat the oven to Gas Mark 5 or 190 C

Find a largeish gratin dish.  I used a fairly shallow one, because I wanted the 'milk' to evaporate a little, but you could also try using a higher-sided, less-wide dish.

Empty the tin of creamed coconut milk into a large bowl.  To the bowl, add the chopped chillies and crushed garlic and a splash of the oil and a pinch of salt.  Peel the sweet potatoes and chop them into discs about the width of a 10p piece. Add the sliced sweet potato to the coconut milk mixture and let it stand for a few minutes, after giving it a good stir.

While that's standing, zest*** and juice the lime and add the zest and the juice to a blender with about 150 g of tahini - about a third to a half of a normal jar.  Whizz the lime juice and tahini together and if it's too stiff, add a little (say, a tablespoon) of your oil.

Grab about half of your sweet potato slices and spread them around the bottom of your gratin dish so that they are more-or-less flat and covering everything.  Dot the tahini mixture on the top (this is most probably where you might need to use the oil to make it more spreadable, although I just left huge dollops all over the potatoes), and then cover with the other half of the sweet potatoes, emptying the remains of the coconut cream mixure over everything once the potatoes are in the dish.

Stick the gratin dish, covered with foil, into the oven for twenty minutes.  After twenty minutes, remove the oil and let the mixture bake down and brown for another thirty minutes. Remove and eat.

Thoughts:  I'm eating it right now, and the tahini is less sweet than the peanut butter was in the original.  It's actually crying out for some toasted cumin seeds in it as well - I'd toast a couple of teaspoons in a frying pan and sprinkle them on the first half of the mixture, along with the tahini / lime blend next time.  The coconut cream seems to do the job of the cow's cream well enough, though.

**You have been warned.  Measurement is for sissies.
***Lemon and lime juice on their own are pretty feebly-flavoured - all the flavour and scent is actually in the peel, hence the use of zest.  Also, bearing in mind the fact that orange peel appears to have cholesterol-lowering properties (see last post), I'm making the (almost) unwarranted assumption that lemon and lime peel will have similar properties, so it can't hurt to include lemon, lime and orange zest where you can.

Sugar, Sugar

How do you get high cholesterol?

The quick answer to this is: Nobody really knows.  We know that the liver makes it and that you can absorb some from your diet.  This chap has a fairly extensive discussion which gets down into the science that your average NHS site doesn't.  He also makes some fairly interesting observations that I'll tackle later**.  In short, you need cholesterol to keep your cells healthy, to help repair damage and to stop water from leaking out of your skin.

The problem is when you are making too much of the cholesterol transporter that takes the cholesterol to where it is needed, from where it is made (in the liver).  Just like an old car going slowly over a cobbled street, this 'transport out' system can grind to a halt over the parts of arteries that have been damaged by various things, dumping its load of cholesterol right there, on the damage.  This 'carrier' of the cholesterol out from the liver often seems to be confused with the cholesterol itself, and is referred to as LDL cholesterol. 

If you were a GCSE student, at this point I'd tell you that the L in LDL stands for Loathsome. 

We don't like this carrier, or the cholesterol carried by it.  It is a vintage car running on unleaded petrol***. It leaves lazy, lie-about cholesterol all over the place, fighting with itself while wondering when the next cheque from the trust fund is going to arrive.

The liver also produces the HDL - High Density Lipoprotein, or, for you GCSE students out there, the Happy cholesterol.  We like this carrier because it contains helpful, hard-working cholesterol - socialist cholesterol, if you will;  the sort of cholesterol that will clean up after all night parties held by the Bullingdon club, because that's just the sort of thing that this cholesterol does. This is the road bicycle of cholesterol carriers; the low-polluting high-density kudos-rich carrier of cholesterol.

Just as society needs to value the people who do the mundane jobs; the jobs that keep the system running, we need to value HDL.  HDL should probably be paid more.  What's important is less that the overall amount of cholesterol that you have is low but rather that  the ratio of HDL to LDL is big enough.  If you get too many trust-fund babies and not enough people doing stuff, then society will collapse.  If your LDL gets too high in relation to your HDL then you are at a higher risk of having a heart attack and your body will collapse.

We don't really know what causes the liver to produce more of one type of cholesterol or another.  We don't really know why cholesterol levels can get higher, or why the ratio of HDL to LDL can change.  What we do know is that we have observed some correlations:



Things that cause your cholesterol levels to get higher, or the ratios to get worse.

Funnily enough, its not the eating of cholesterol rich foods that's the problem.  While some foods, such as eggs, prawns and offal (if the livers of various animals make cholesterol, then the livers of various animals are going to have cholesterol in them) contain significant amounts of cholesterol, the ingestion of these foods has an insignificant effect (probably - it's always a 'probably') on the levels of cholesterol in your blood, and may even raise the HDL to LDL ratio (cite various articles, which I can't be bothered to look for right now, because you aren't my mother), which would be a good thing according to current theories.  So you probably don't need to worry too much about eating these foods - although moderation would be good; don't eat them every day.

Saturated fats seemed to be fingered as the culprit in most places: Here, here and here, for example. Again, I can't find any detail on how this works, but there does seem to be a correlation.  Some links suggest that saturated fats raise LDL levels, but other links suggest that saturated fats may actually be responsible for raised HDL levels (remember: HDL = Happy fat).  And here, we have the start of a conundrum which I shall deal with in the section after next.

Trans fats - vegetable oils that have been hydrogenated so that all the double bonds are broken down and hydrogen added to their available ends - appear to be the big daddy of cholesterol badness.  Trans fats are - or were - commonly used in industrial food production because they make food production cheaper and easier.  Many states in America have now legislated that all foods containing trans fats be labelled as containing trans fats.

While we don't have compulsory food labelling in the UK (why not?), the Food Standards Agency claims that voluntary control of trans fats has reduced their presence in the British diet (by how much the use of trans fats has been reduced is not clear, as food isn't clearly labelled when it contains trans fats, although 'hydrogenated vegetable oils' is one clue that they're present).  British Doctors are asking for legislation banning trans fats altogether.

Alcohol - too much alcohol can raise your triglycerides. Triglycerides are related to cholesterol levels in a way I have yet to comprehend, but the correlation seems pretty consistent and agreed upon over all the discussions that touch upon it. I have been looking for evidence of the Presybterian / Methodist-culture assumption that anything-you-enjoy-must-be-bad-for-you biasing opinions, but it isn't really there. That's too much alcohol, by the way, a definition which seems pretty open to debate - maybe that's where the tinpot tabernaclists have their influence, in that they define a level which is lower than it should be (given the corresponding evidence that just enough alcohol is actually pretty good for your cholesterol levels - both amount and HDL / LDL ratios).

And lastly, but probably not least, fructose - or fruit sugar - appears to have a huge deletory effect on cholesterol levels.  This is the one that suprises most people, but the evidence is sprinkled throughout the links I've given so far, especially the first one, by Mark Johnson. Or you can look at this.  Or you can look at a list of URLs dealing with this issue, and pick your own cite. 

While fructose is, obviously, present in fruit, it's also a derived commercially as a by-product of the extraction of ordinary sugar (sucrose) from sugar cane; it is 'sweeter' than sucrose and is omnipresent in our diet as the corn syrup used industrially to sweeten foods, or brown them. 

Fructose is hypothesised to be responsible for metabolic syndrome. 

All the evidence indicates that it's evil, and it's everywhere. It's probably OK to eat fructose in small amounts - such as the levels available from one or two helpings of daily fruit - but if you are eating commercially produced food, it seems, you are eating fructose and all that that implies.

Fructose and too much alcohol seem to work in similar ways.

So, those are the big baddies for now -  interestingly, the two food groups which seem to be most responsible for raised cholesterol levels are the two foods that have been added to our diet recently as a result of industrial innovation to make the large scale production of food even cheaper.


Food which actually may lower your cholesterol or cause the ratios to get better.

This would mainly be oats.  The key thing about oats is that they contain soluble fibre and "Soluble fibre binds to bile acids in the small intestine, making them less likely to enter the body; this in turn lowers cholesterol levels in the blood"

Everything you need to know about soluble fibre can be found in this Wikipedia article.

To be fair, anything that contains soluble fibre is fair game - and that means most vegetables.

Soy Protein - here's the Wikipedia link.   Note that other sources say that the correlation hasn't been established.  Google for yourself.

Red wine - here's a New Yorker Science Article (I decided that the Daily Mail was a link too far).  A more scholarly assessment is here.  Please note that neither article links to a definitive assessment of what actually is a moderate level of imbibing.  That's because I don't think one's been done. 

Garlic.  This has been established according to the scholarly article linked. 

Monounsaturated fats.  Here's the link to the Wikipedia article and in that article, you'll see lists of which oils are monounsaturated.  Olive oil is top of the list - but there are some suprising inclusions.  The article notes that tallow (beef fat) is 50% monounsaturated. That's the fat you get in steaks that in other articles is slated.

Please note that the wiki article is very careful to say that the ingestion of monounsaturated fats lowers LDL cholesterol and may raise HDL cholesterol.  May.  I'll deal with this next section.

Unsaturated fats. If monounsaturated fats lower your cholesterol level, then polyunsaturated fats lower it still further, right?  Hmm.

There are all sorts of odd things, that, Daily-Mail stylee, are now found to lower cholesterol and / or lower LDL and / or raise HDL.  For examples, orange peel, or tumeric, ginger, cinammon and rosemary.  This is a fertile field for quackery, and while none of these 'correlations' are likely to be incorrect to the extent that they damage someone adjusting their diet on the basis of the 'correlation' being represented as fact - in other words, 'it can't hurt' - I can find very little evidence to back most of this stuff up.  Mind you, I haven't spent a long time looking.
.

Food about which there is some reliable controversy

Coconut oil and milk. This refers to the milk and oil that is made from the coconut 'meat' found inside the coconut, rather than the very delicious water that drains out of a recently cracked green coconut. 

Coconut oil / milk is high in saturated fat, according to a few of the links already provided (1 2 3) In fact, as that second link shows, there are different types of saturated fat, and the profile of coconut oil is distinctly different to, say, the profile of lard.

There has been one bit of research, where people eating a diet high in coconut oil and various derivatives had their cholesterol measured and it was low; they then moved to New Zealand and Australia and reduced their intake of coconut derivatives.  Their cholesterol immediately went up.

There's an awful lot of anecdata relating to coconut oil and meat out there****, which indicates that coconut oil may not be the Big Bad that, say, the NHS makes it out to be.  There's a mechanism to explain the difference between this saturated fat and the saturated fats which seem to correlate to high cholesterol and high LDL levels, that is the different balance of triglycerides (i.e. the preponderance of shorter chain triglycerides) in coconut oil. 

I'm fairly convinced that coconut oil isn't the big bad that conventional government advice would have it be. 

Saturated fats.  While an excess of them probably is reliably correlated to high cholesterol levels, there are indications that saturated fats may actually raise HDL levels.  That link, mind, presents the thoughts of someone convinced by the Atkins diet, but I've read such murmurings elsewhere.  This probably deserves its own post at some time.


How much fat should you eat?

The important thing is that one realises that a fat-free diet is really not very healthy at all.  All the indications are that the fat that you do eat should be largely monounsaturated or polyunsaturated, although there are indications that a small proportion of saturated fat in that won't hurt.

In order to lower cholesterol, it's essential that one avoids trans fats and fructose, in the form of corn syrup.  To my mind, the easiest way to do this is to avoid commercially made foods, especially sweet foods.  I've already started making sure that I eat a bowl of porridge a day; I'm (sadly) going to be giving up the golden syrup that I love to dribble all over it (Golden syrup is essentially corn syrup). 

So.  The NHS recommends no more than 20g of saturated fat per day for a woman, and that seems reasonable enough.  What I think is important, though, is that that amount isn't reduced too much in a fit of healthy eating.  Looking around various sites, it's probably important that that amount doesn't go beneath around 12 g a day for reasons of maintaining the HDL levels.

About 30% of the calories in your diet should come from fat in total. Saturated fat should be limited to 7 of that 30%.  This means that the rest of the 'fat' 30% - around 65 g, or two and a bit ounces - should come from monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fat.  This is not an abstemious amount. 

Conclusion

When trying to lower my cholesterol total while maintaining the favourable HDL: LDL profile, I should be doing the following:

1.  Avoiding all trans-fats and corn syrups.  This means being neurotic about avoiding commercially derived biscuits and cakes. Absolutely avoid commercially sweetened products that may contain fructose.

2.  Not worrying too much about the amount of oil in my cooking so long as it is monounsaturated (olive)  or polyunsaturated (corn) oil. Not to use ridiculous amounts, though, but most certainly, not to cut fat and oil out of the diet altogether.  Oily fish such as tuna and salmon raise the amount of 'good oil'.

3.  Include a small amount of saturated fats in the diet - this could be coconut oil or (from further reading) lean red meat such as beef, in moderation.

4. Eat oats and tofu, drink red wine (in moderation), and put plenty of garlic into everything.

I'll look at specific issues when I write about recipes.

edited to add: The ocado website lists the ingredients in many foods. Here, for example, are the ingredients in Tunnocks Caramel Wafers.  You'll see something listed there called 'invert sugar'.  The wiki link for invert sugar describes it thus: "Inverted or invert^[1] sugar syrup is a mixture of glucose and fructose; it is obtained by splitting sucrose into these two components"

While corn syrup may not be prevalent in this country, it seems that invert sugar is.  You can use the Ocado website to investigate anything that you're worried about.

I investigated Tunnocks fairly randomly - they seemed to me to have the sort of sweetness that is disproportionate to their size, and I suggest that this is possibly a sign that a fructose-containing syrup, if not specifically corn syrup, is one of the ingredients.


**The problem with all of this survey of the literature that I've done is that I am having to disinter the knowleadgable from the fantastic, and the Daily Mail from the rational.  What Mark Johnson says chimes with what I've read elsewhere, and he gives a nice list of references

***I'm just about to stretch a metaphor.  Please do excuse me.  Also remember that we actually do need some LDL because otherwise the cholesterol that we need wouldn't get where it is needed, just like we do need some sort of incentive in society.

****Much of it, admittedly, from organisations trying to sell coconut products.

Introduction

So,  I went to the doctor and told him that I'm feeling tired all the time and when I lie down at night my heart is racing and I that have upped (well, started) my exercise and cycle roughly six miles a day and I don't smoke any more, so could he please test my blood because my brother has diabetes and has just had a stroke, and the last time I had a blood test I was told I had sticky blood, so could he please just test everything, because what I read on the internet is worrying.  He agreed.  Of course, he probably should have told me to stop reading the internet, but he's a nice man and clever enough not to demand the impossible.

Strangely enough, visiting the Doctor in itself made me feel better, so I forgot to phone back for the results for a week, and when I finally did, the receptionist told me that there was something 'wrong' with my kidneys (Panic!  How will I manage those insulin shots?) and that my cholesterol was very, very high, so I collapsed, sobbing, and so she promised to get the Doctor himself to phone me.   Which he did while I was merrily espousing on the whereabouts of the Higgs-Boson to several colleagues who I am convinced must be interested by this, and why neutrinos may be able to take short cuts through space in the presence of mass, and I had to run to the phone; the Higgs really doesn't want to be found, does it?

Anyway, it turns out that whatever-it-is with my kidneys is only at the high end of normal, so I must stop worrying about that (ha!) but that I should try to get my cholesterol down and he'll test me again in three months.  He told me the number, as well: 7.2.

Now, I love cooking and most especially, recently, I have been loving masterchef-with-added-cream style cooking.  I love sauces made with double cream and risottos laced with butter and three-cheese pies with flaky pastry on the top and creamed spinach and chicken stew made with bacon fat and roast potatoes with extra goose and shoulder of pork cooked so slowly so all the fat melts into the flesh instead of away and you can pull it apart with a spoon and omlettes and cheescake and buttery breakfast croissants and biscuit base and  LARD. So, it's not suprising, really, that my cholesterol is high.  Not that high, actually - well, higher than recommended , but not in the panic zone, although it's getting there.

Now, cholesterol and its effect on heart disease isn't really understood very well, and the advice keeps changing, and there are some hints that actually, in older people (a group that I belong to), some cholesterol may actually have a protective effect on all sorts of things; what all sources seem to agree on is that what matters is the LDL:HDL ratio.  LDL is the bad cholesterol, the one that clogs things up, and HDL is the good cholesterol, the one that actually cleans the bad cholesterol up. 

My numbers for LDLand HDL are 4.82 to 1.58 This site gives numbers about the recommended ratio of one to the other as well as the required ratio of HDL to the total.  The good news is that I'm actually just in the right range for the required ratio of HDL to the total (although it would be great if I could get further into that range) but clearly I've got way too much of the bad stuff and it would be a Good Idea if I could get that down. 

I've had my eye on cholesterol science-stuff for years, having always had a slightly higher cholesterol level, and I'm pretty convinced by this HDL: LDL thinking.  What the Doctor should have said to me is: You need to get your LDL levels down and your HDL levels up. 

Hence this blog, which will be a record of what I am going to do to try to get my HDL levels up and my LDL levels down.  Me experimenting on me, if you like.  Anecdata.

The real problem, as I see it, is that the nicest food, the cream-laden, LARD-serving, lip-licking, butter-ridden luscious food is the food that raises, apparently, the LDL. 

Good-for-you food, on the whole, sucks. 

The challenge is to make the food that lowers the LDL and raises the HDL brilliant food, food that you want to bury your face into, and hoover straight to your taste centres.   My mother would eat fruit with a fixed expression of enjoyment on her face, making great noises of appreciation, and I knew, and she knew that I knew, that she was only doing it to be good; eating good to be good and appease that great Daddy Doctor in the sky.  I mean, there's only so often that people go to the fridge, open it and turn it upside down looking for that last bit of apple that they may have forgotten about yesterday and that they've been thinking about all day while at work, and that really isn't that often at all.

So that's the main thing I'm going to be doing with this blog.  I'm going to a. keep a record of what I'm eating, and possibly what I'm drinking (although I may lie about that) and b. invent recipes that, according to research, may help lower LDL and raise HDL and c. blog about my biking  (Well, I've got to put c. somewhere).