Day 70: 4 mg cholesterol from yogurt

Easy peasy: being vegetarian, hence not consuming any meat, and your cholesterol intake just becomes mind boggling low: the 4 mg cholesterol came from a delicious, homemade yogurt dressing.

First and foremost, we are back in our own house, meaning that we won’t be eating out much and that we have a scale at bay, so we can measure how much we are eating.

To be successful, you do need a correct calorie counter. Today I noticed that only caloriecounter.com.au mentions cholesterol in Farmers Union Yoghurt Natural European Style, 17 mg per 100 gram. Other sites like livestrong.com, myfitnesspall.com, allfitness.com, fatsecret.com, … don’t mention any cholesterol or even worse, mention zero cholesterol. So from now on, I will be using the Australian calorie counter 🙂

Less counting, more smart choices

Last weeks we were on holiday, but we kept our diet in mind (not to say we must have gone overboard) and we went shopping for nuts to make nut milk. Nothing wrong with our almond milk, but just get some variety in flavor (my wife isn’t jumping up and down about the almond milk).

Yesterday I soaked walnuts and blended them today for breakfast to add with the oats. I simply take 20 grams (0.7 fluid oz) of nuts, soak them overnight and add about 180 to 200 ml (6 to 6 3/4 fluid oz) of water, to end up with a milk containing an estimated 4 to 5 % fat. Normal cows milk has about 3.6 to 3.8 % of fat, the latter was my favorite and especially delicious when bought pasteurized in Germany 🙂

Lunch: bread with cherry spread. We can’t be 100% sure whether there aren’t eggs, lard or butter added, so we just hope the bakery bakes "cheap" with only flour, yeast, water and salt.

Dinner: I made some bean soup using a mixture of dried soup beans: soaked overnight and boiled for 2 hours. Not smart to puree the soup after 1 hour, as the starch from the potatoes started to stick at the bottom. I cooked the soup to a thick, dhal like consistency, but it lacked a decent amount of "oomph".

The recipe comes from an old European cookbook: 100 gram (3 ½ oz) of both dried beans and potato, 1 onion, 1 carrot, pepper and salt (only add the salt after 1 hour of boiling the soup so the salt doesn’t extract the water from the beans) and bay leaves. Start with sauteing the onion and the carrot first, then add potato and rinsed beans.

Bring all to a boil with 1 liter (2 pints) of water and once boiling, add 1 cup of cold water (the cookbook mentions that this will break the "seed coat" of the beans.) Maybe the second hour of cooking isn’t needed (just boil 5 minutes more after the soup is pureed for the starch of the potatoes to thicken the soup).

With the bean soup some oven roasted French bread with olive oil (a good combination!, the cookbook mentiones pan fried croutons), salad leaves, chopped tomatoes and a dressing made with yoghurt, mustard, olive oil, pepper, salt and the seeds and inners of the cut tomatoes: quite a delicious dressing 🙂

Total cholesterol intake today: about 4 mg

• breakfast: 0 mg
• lunch: 0 mg
• dinner: 4 mg from yogurt dressing

Don’t eat anything that comes from an animal, and your cholesterol intake will be zero: it’s as easy as that. Unfortunately, you need to find delicious recipes… After 70 days of diet, I only have 2 no cholesterol recipes that I find worthy enough to share.

The challenge remains: where to find delicious low cholesterol recipes?

Mainstream TV chefs and cookbooks just add some vegetarian recipes to follow "the health trend", but they aren’t really eating what they are cooking. Exception is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – an advocate of honest food – who went vegetarian in an experiment (where he did mention: can’t wait to eat good meat).

Hugh is honest about "eating more vegetables" and so are we: we don’t want to become vegetarian for the sake of being vegetarian, but we do want to eat less meat and be healthy. If that means strictly no meat, then by all means I will stop eating meat. For now I still believe in the good old saying: eat all things in moderation.