Open Writing

I believe it’s an established fact that very young children are extremely sensitive to flavors and smells. This explains why baby foods and mothers’ milk taste of nothing much at all, but the little buggers love it anyway. I was breast fed until an embarrassingly late age, but I didn’t remember the taste until I had the chance to sample it later in life. I do, however, clearly remember being nauseated by the smell of roast lamb, in fact any meat, when I was in my pre-school years.

I grew out of those reactions pretty quickly as my taste buds dulled, which is fortunate, because my mother, who loved me dearly, nevertheless was not about to accommodate a fussy eater. As I have said in previous columns, my mother was a superb cook, and no, not just because she was my mother. The common denominator that ran through many of the foods she prepared was grease.

Her preference was lard, but she was equally at home with beef dripping, goose grease, or bacon fat as long as the bacon wasn’t smoked; and butter of course. So her wonderful pastry was made with lard, as was the bread she baked twice a week. Butter was the basis for many of her sauces, both sweet and savory. As a special treat, she would make me a butter and sugar sandwich. Imagine! She made her mincemeat, dumplings and puddings with beef suet. Aside from the ingredients she used, her crispy chicken skin and roast pork rind topped off my list of favorites.

Given current dietary theories, against this backdrop of saturated fat consumption I have to wonder why people in my family weren’t dropping like flies from heart disease and clogged arteries. We weren’t alone in our dietary habits, yet I remember only one or two people on the street where I lived who succumbed to cardiac failure. Most folk lived into their eighties and a few into their nineties.

The medical answer to this apparent contradiction is that we were more active then, but even that theory doesn’t fly with me. True, we didn’t drive everywhere in cars, or sit watching TV for hours, but there were no manual workers in my neighborhood, and the extent of the walking we did was the ten minutes from our houses to the tram or the pub. Laughable though it might seem today, we did sit and listen to the radio for periods that were probably equivalent to my contemporary TV watching.

When I left my parent’s home, my dietary patterns changed radically. My new wife wasn’t a cook, and I didn’t know enough at the time to take up the slack; so no more homemade pastries, mincemeat or suet dumplings. By the time I came to the US to live, my diet was much closer to what is considered healthy today. Now, thirty-five years later, it’s closer still. I also get more strenuous exercise than I have for years. In that same time frame, checks on my cholesterol had not shown any abnormalities.

But recent blood tests showed that my bad cholesterol was elevated! My doctor wants me to change my diet – eliminate cheese, the one steak I have each month, the two eggs I enjoy once a week, and the butter I occasionally cook with. Fat chance; no pun intended. Dr. N is my newfound Dr. Do Little. In a recent column I related how I was searching once more for a primary physician who would, in general, leave me alone.

Dr. N is probably as close as I will get to my ideal in this day of testing for everything, but she does seem to be fixated on the cholesterol thing. Being of imposing stature herself, she may be fighting the same battle, and just wants everyone to join the crusade. But I’m not convinced that a simple blood test can adequately explain my metabolism just by lumping me in with everyone else in that prescribed LDL bracket.

I suspect that, in time, the Lipid Profile, as the test is called, will go the way of many other tests that set out to predict our mortality. Just this week I read that the test for prostate cancer is about to be struck off. Apparently, rather than saving lives, it is causing avoidable deaths from the procedures that are initiated by a positive test result.

I know people of my age whose cholesterol is off the charts. They are taking medication, and live model lives according to the conventional wisdom, but their condition refuses to yield. They are on one end of the scale, and I and my fellow grease monkeys are on the other, that is if I exclude the Inuit. Their metabolism has obviously accommodated a ton of grease and a dearth of veggies, otherwise there wouldn’t be any of them left.

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