After 2 weeks of my low cholesterol diet, I noticed my previous diet was rich on cholesterol rich food like squid and prawns.
You must have noticed the monotony that I am eating lots and lots of pork meat. That’s because we always fill up our freezer with meat, prawns, squid, fish and chicken.
Now that we started our low cholesterol diet, we are no more eating prawns nor squid, so basically all that’s available in our freezer now is pork meat and some chicken. Eating out I opted for things not in our freezer like lamb:
- 1 serving of 4 oz or 113 grams squid contains 405 mg cholesterol
- 100 grams of tiger prawn (raw product) contains 121 mg of cholesterol
- 1 serving mutton kofta curry: 121 mg cholesterol
Especially the squid – my favorite- just by itself simply busts the daily recommended cholesterol intake for healthy people of 300 mg.
Mutton or prawn meals are still not too rich in cholesterol, but in Asia we eat 3 times a day a warm meal. So it’s not to difficult to eat 300 mg of dietary cholesterol, just with 3 "normal" daily meals.
And sometimes we go out again for tea and supper, because Malaysians do eat 24/7… that kind of lifestyle could explain why our LDL levels are too high. Add to that: I used to drink milk for breakfast and added condensed milk in the drinks I drank when going out (coffee with condensed milk- "kopi ping" and tea with condensed milk – "tea tarik"). Anyway, we can only be sure whether our diet was the real culprit after doing our next bloodtest 🙂
Today’s meals
Breakfast: the usual cooked oats with almond milk and a banana for some extra soluble fibers and a nice taste as well 🙂
Lunch: fried vermicelli rice noodles: 60 grams of meat/person so 51 mg cholesterol a person.
Dinner: fried potato with mixed salad (including an apple and roasted pine nuts), low fat yoghurt dressing, stuffed tomatoes and a fruit smoothie. I bought a now package of low fat yoghurt of a different brand, yet again no mention of the cholesterol content, so we use the estimate that 245 gram yoghurt contains 15 mg of cholesterol. We ate 35 gram/person so 2 mg cholesterol: much better than the 10% fat Greek yoghurt that contains for a similar serving about 10 times more cholesterol.
The pork meat stuffed tomatoes were no winning recipe: I blended the pork meat with the inside of the tomato, 1 piece of roasted breadcrumbs, 1 garlic, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and spices 1 teaspoon seeds of each fennel, coriander and cumin. Some macadamia nuts and olive oil and some pepper.
All in all we started with 160 mg pork meat, so that should be 68 mg cholesterol (yet we didn’t finish all…) Anyway’s, to keep things simple, if we had eaten everything, the cholesterol/person intake would have been 68 mg.
Today’s cholesterol intake: 121 mg
- Breakfast: 0 mg cholesterol
- Lunch: 51 mg cholesterol
- Tea: 0 mg cholesterol (another banana)
- Dinner: 70 mg cholesterol (68 from pork meat and 2 from low fat yoghurt dressing)
The most important thing we learned today is that our varied staple of pork meat, prawn and squid now is reduced to mostly pork meat. Next time we fill up our freezer, we need to make sure we add some fish and chicken, to get some variety again. Can’t be making pork patties all the time 🙂
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