Surely it was wiser simply to avoid fats altogether? I wavered, though, in 2013, when The New England Journal of Medicine published an article endorsing the salubrious effects of Mediterranean eating habits. Still, I remained wary of the delicacies of my childhood. The Atkins diet and, more recently, the paleo diet have popularized the idea that you can get slim eating high-protein, high-cholesterol foods. In some quarters, blame for obesity and heart disease has shifted from fat to carbohydrates. People now look for ways of boosting the “good cholesterol” in their blood and extol the benefits of Mediterranean diets, with their emphasis on olive oil and fatty nuts. Researchers have questioned whether dietary fat is necessarily dangerous, and have shown that not all fats are created equal. In recent decades, fat has been making a comeback. But as soon as my doctor put me on just a tiny dose of a statin medication my cholesterol plummeted more than eighty points. It was unchanged genes have a way of signalling their power. Six months later, having shed ten pounds, I rechecked my level. When, in my forties, my cholesterol level rose to 242-200 is considered the upper limit of what’s healthy-I embarked on a regimen that restricted fatty foods (and also cut down on carbohydrates).
The dangers of fat haunted me after his death. Yet, despite the restrictive diet, his number scarcely budged, and a few years later, in his mid-fifties, he had a heart attack and died. My father’s blood-cholesterol level-not to mention that of his siblings and friends-became a regular topic of conversation at the dinner table. I recall experiencing something like withdrawal, daydreaming about past feasts as my stomach grumbled. Margarine dethroned butter, vinegar replaced cream sauce, poached fish substituted for brisket. Onion rolls slathered with butter, herring in thick cream sauce, brisket of beef with a side of stuffed derma, and other staples of our family cuisine disappeared from our table. In the early nineteen-sixties, when cholesterol was declared an enemy of health, my parents quickly enlisted in the war on fat. Nutritional science is too complex to furnish easy answers about what to eat.
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