KL trip – fighting against Cholesterol

Last week I was in Kuala Lumpur (KL) to for a meeting. My KL colleagues brought me to try various KL's famous dish including the “roast-pork noodles”. This KL style Roast pork had zero resemblance from the HK counterpart; it was totally covered with black sauce, but it is delicious.

I realize KL food is really tasty, but like its many other famous dish, it is usually quite salty and oily. The rich aroma is often created by cooking with a generous amount of lard. I am not too used to it since I have a much lighter taste-bud.

Some people thought it is ok to consume fatty food, as long as they avoid food that is high in cholesterol (the notorious to clog your blood vessels). But what they don’t realize is, only 20% of the cholesterol in the body is ingested from our diet and the remaining 80% of cholesterol is generated by our very own livers, as a response to eating saturated fat.

My mother is one good example. She loves eating soda crackers, thinking that it is healthy because it’s “fortified with calcium” and low in cholesterol. Thus she was extremely shocked and upset to find herself “scoring” badly in her health screening. She is hypertensive and has high cholesterol in her blood. “I don’t eat unhealthily and I don’t even get to enjoy eating crabs and other good food often, so why should I suffered from this kind of “rich-man disease”?! ” she was very frustrated.

In fact, a lot of seemingly “safe” food that emphasize on “Low / No Cholesterol” is actually not heart-friendly at all, and many uninformed consumers suffered from heart problem even though they tried all means to avoid food that is high in cholesterol.

So how to control your cholesterol level? Try these:

1. Cut Fats:

• Avoid all deep-fried food (so eliminate saturated fats)
• Skip the snacks/ biscuits aisles in supermarket as processed foods contain hydropgenated fats. So say no to margarine, pastries, packaged cookies, crackers, potato chips, and other snack foods. (hell that's like more than half the food items in supermarket!)
• Cut down fat intake by removing fats around red meat, chicken/duck skin, full cream diary products.

2. Eat More

• Soy protein (like Tofu)
• Fruits & vegetable (never forget daily your 2+2 servings)
• Fish (such as salmon, mackerel, sardine)
• Oatmeal
• Flaxseed

3. Exercise!

• this can raise your metabolism and burn calories, losing fat weight, lowering total cholesterol, increases the good HDL cholesterol that helps prevent plaque from forming on the walls of the arteries

4. Relax lah!

• Fatigue, anger, and distress can raise your body's adrenaline levels, causing cholesterol to rise.

5. Medication

• Your family doctor may prescribe you Statins, which are able to control an enzyme in the body that is responsible for the manufacture fats. This control process reduces the body's production of cholesterol. Thus help control triglyceride levels, lower LDL or "bad cholesterol," increase the HDL or "good cholesterol," and lower total cholesterol.