Gaining Satisfaction of Neither Virtue Nor Gluttony

I grew up in simpler times. One reason I’m sure of that is because we had never heard of cholesterol. We ate our bacon and eggs in the morning and drank milk with our lunch and had rich thick chicken gravy and slabs of cheese with our apple pie in the evening. “Good, wholesome food,” my mother used to call it. And some of us got fat. And I suppose some of us died of heart attacks as a result. But we didn’t know anything about cholesterol--and God, how good that food was.

Now cholesterol has replaced the economy and baseball and sex and politics and children as our major topic of conversation. We’re bombarded by books and articles and commercials and medical edicts to bring that cholesterol down, baby, or it’s curtains. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t enjoy eating anymore. If I eat what the cholesterol experts tell me to eat, it tastes like sawdust. And if I don’t, I’m so immersed in guilt that I can’t enjoy it.

So I function down the middle somewhere, gaining the satisfaction of neither virtue nor gluttony. And to compound matters further, I keep getting all these mixed signals from the people who are supposed to know about such things.

Take this past week, for example, when two new cholesterol stories appeared in the press. The U.S. egg industry--which has been hurting badly since egg yolks were accused of being the principal heavy among cholesterol-producing foods--claims that it has created hens that will lay low-cholesterol eggs. And up at Stanford University, a team of researchers has published a paper suggesting that low cholesterol may actually hasten death as we grow older.

Now I like both of these developments a lot. I’m especially enchanted with the low-cholesterol hen. According to the American Egg Board, egg sales have fallen by $1 billion a year since 1984, but instead of taking this laying down, egg producers have gone to the source: the hen. They claim that by putting her up in posh quarters--better lighting, organic food, more space, that sort of thing--they can get her to lay lower cholesterol eggs, apparently out of gratitude. And they have lab reports to back them up. A lot of state agriculture departments--including California’s--say this is mostly a marketing gimmick, but they also admit that the average amount of cholesterol has gone down appreciably in all eggs in recent years.

Meanwhile, those Stanford researchers have challenged the evidence regarding the advantages of reducing cholesterol and the value of cholesterol testing for adults with no symptoms of heart disease.

I want to believe. The alternative to believing these folks is to give up enjoying food for the rest of my life. I know that now. When I discovered that my cholesterol level was awesome and was warned to do something about it posthaste, I bought a bunch of those books about how to reduce your cholesterol level drastically in 30 days--and sort of studied them. Meanwhile, my wife bought some low-cholesterol cookbooks that claimed, with a straight face, that their recipes were every bit as tasty as a medium rare steak.

So my wife started cooking this stuff. She baked oat bran muffins and piled them in our refrigerator. She made meatless pasta sauce and stocked the cupboard with health cereals. She even made turkey meat loaf. The 11-year-old kid and I were polite. We picked at it and pushed it around our plates, and the muffins got rancid in the refrigerator, and I smuggled in a box of Frosted Flakes to keep body and soul together.

I’ll tell you something about turkey meat loaf. If any book or nutritionist or acquaintance at a cocktail party tries to tell you it’s as good as ground beef, don’t be taken in. It isn’t. No amount of catsup or horseradish can make it palatable.

My wife has given up now. She still doesn’t buy red meat, and the cupboard is still full of oat bran, and we drink non-fat milk. But she doesn’t make bran muffins or turkey meat loaf or whole oat soup or tofu burgers any longer, and I don’t think she’s cracked the cholesterol cookbook in weeks--even after she found she has high cholesterol, too, an ironic development in view of her lifetime of assiduously avoiding junk foods.

So I’m sort of marking time. I figure I’ve got some pretty good things going. I play tennis with this doctor from Baltimore who comes out to Orange County every few months in connection with a device he’s working on that can be inserted into blood vessels to scrape out the cholesterol. He says it’s only a year or so away; I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, I’ll be sweating out the low-cholesterol hens and hoping that the medical people get their acts together. If they finally decide that cholesterol is a good thing after all, I don’t want to be caught back in the pack, wondering why in hell I ever gave up cheese and rib-eye steaks.