First time boiling an egg in 2012

1 month after receiving my blood test results that indicated a high LDL, my initial resolve to restraint from eating eggs finally caved in and I decided to cook an egg for lunch.

Lunch was a soft boiled egg and a piece of bread. Sounds meagre but well, its a simple lunch for a simple guy..

Well, if I really shouldn’t be eating eggs for the rest of my life, then I shouldn’t have eaten:

• the butter cookies that were served around Chinese new year
• the piece of chocolate cake dessert that my wife insisted on having when we were at our favourite restaurant
• the yummy egg tart with not only eggs in the custard, but also in the pastry
• the egg noodles that my wife usually cooks for a quick lunch
• the deep fried Hainanese pork chop coated with an egg based batter that my almost 90year father in law insist on cooking for us when we go home to visit..
•  …

As with all diets, there are excuses not to follow the diet. And when everybody tells you that you can’t eat eggs when your cholesterol is too high, it becomes difficult to swim upstream (so to speak )and justify ones cravings.

My excuse was that compared to all the above, the most healthy way of eating your eggs is simply by boiling them. No added fat nor any other ingredients…

Until I started comparing nutritional facts like e.g. the difference between a boiled egg and piece of cake. Seems my 1 egg covers 70% of the advisable daily intake of cholesterol (when following a 2000 calorie diet), compared to only 12% in the cake. When it comes to saturated fat, the amount in the cake was not even double that of an egg.

(Nutritional facts courtesy of about.com’s calorie counter)

What is important here is to note that some more objective research has to be done 🙂 To my amazement: eggs do contain much more cholesterol than I imagined and cakes contain less saturated fat than I feared. In other words: lots of imagination and myths versus little facts.

What is a fact is that we need cholesterol to be healthy. It is an essential component of our body cells and is made by the liver as well as extracted from our food.

My quest for my cholesterol diary is to note down, share and discuss with you, what cholesterol is all about, find out when and why cholesterol becomes really bad, and how we can keep our cholesterol levels within healthy margins.