Healthy Dieting

Consider your average working person: let us call her Samantha. She is in a rush to get to an early meeting, so she doesn’t have breakfast. She drives through the smog of the early rush-hour traffic, fretting about being late. When she’s finished the meeting, she rushes out to lunch. She orders a toasted sandwich with smoked salmon, and finishes off with filter coffee that has been brewing on the stove for many hours. She eats her meal sitting in the sun. Then it’s back to the office for more coffee as she frantically races against a deadline. Samantha arrives home at seven and is exhausted and weak, having survived most of the day by burning her own body stores for energy. She tucks into a marinated steak, flash-fried in a pan, with a smoked bacon sauce and a few gem squashes. To finish off her hard day, she has four glasses of wine and a few cigarettes with her best friend.

Notice any anti-oxidants here? There are none. But Samantha has been under attack by oxidants from all sides during the day — the sun, the smoked food, the wine, the cigarettes, the stress.

Now if Samantha spent her days in a loincloth peacefully gathering berries, and if her biggest concern was that her children were going to fall into a nearby puddle, the half-kilogram of fresh fruit she would be eating would provide her with sufficient anti-oxidants to prevent any oxidative damage. Unfortunately, life is not like this any more, and most of us are not eating enough anti-oxidants.

You might be wondering what this has to do with cholesterol. If we have lots of oxidants flowing through our blood all the time (as Samantha does), they will bounce against the sides of our arteries and ‘burn’ them, too. This will cause a little wound on the artery wall, which will immediately start repairing itself by accumulating platelets (just as a scratch on the skin exudes a sticky, bloody substance, which is the beginning of a healing scab).

If there are lots of fats and cholesterol flowing through your blood, some of these will adhere to the sticky wound on the inside of the artery. This is the beginning of an atherogenic plaque (a sticky mass of cholesterol on the inside of the artery).

When there are many oxidants and fats in the blood, blood vessels can become partially blocked by such a cholesterol deposit. This deposit can break off during exercise or stress (when the heart is beating faster), and can travel harmlessly around in the bloodstream for a while. If, however, this plaque fragment gets stuck in a smaller blood vessel, such as one in the brain or heart, it will prevent blood from flowing freely through that organ. This is what causes a cerebral (brain) stroke, or a heart attack.

It is vital, therefore, to control the amount of oxidants surging through the blood (so there are no ‘burn wounds’ caused to the arteries), and to restrict the amount of fats in the blood (so there is nothing to ’stick’ to the artery walls).

This is easier said than done. No one these days can afford to leave a well-paying job to go and pick berries in a loincloth. The answer is to provide our bodies with enough anti-oxidants to cancel out the many oxidants we are subjected to.

To do this, you can eat six oysters, 44 oranges, half a kilogram of spinach and two tins of baked beans a day. This should be enough to see you through — if you can manage it, which of course is impossible unless you do nothing but eat all day. A far simpler solution is to take anti-oxidants in the form of supplements, and to back those up by eating as many ‘polish foods’as you can fit into your stomach.

Your dietician and pharmacist will be able to advise you on the right supplement for your lifestyle. Supplements can be taken individually (in the form of Vitamin C, beta-carotene, zinc, and so on) or you can opt, more conveniently, for an all-in-one formulation, often labelled Anti-oxidant formula’.

Lipid hyperphagia

Lipid hyperphagia is a transient (yet usually very dangerous) increase in blood-cholesterol levels as a result of lifestyle errors. If a person who is otherwise disease-free suddenly develops high cholesterol, it is probably because he has not been eating enough fibre, has been overindulging in saturated fats, and has not been doing enough exercise. Luckily this type of cholesterol problem is very easy to control.

Once again, your best bet is to ask your doctor for a referral to a dietician, who will give you advice about a low-fat, high-fibre diet (and hopefully follow that up with a pep-talk about moderation!).

Exercise is also fundamental to the treatment of lipid hyperphagia, because it increases the levels of HDL, or ‘good’ cholesterol in

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