If your family is like mine, the ‘Broccoli Salad’ brought to family events is a dish laden with mayonnaise and sugar, not to mention bacon. Delicious, sure, but not at all heart-healthy.
Recently, a friend brought Cookie + Kate’s Favorite Broccoli Salad to a dinner party and I was WOWED. Not only was it delicious, I loved it even though the recipe includes raw red onion, which I ordinarily despise.
My friend Lisa, who made this dish, explained her take on the recipe: she always makes the dressing the day before (or at least many hours before) and adds the onions to the dressing.
February is ‘American Heart Month’ — the perfect time to consider your heart health and the steps you can take to minimize heart disease risk.
One of the easiest and most important things you can do if you have high cholesterol and/or high blood pressure (two key heart disease risk factors) is to ASK FOR YOUR ‘NUMBERS.’
Information is power! If you have your blood pressure numbers AND your full lipid (cholesterol) panel results, you can easily calculate your own ’10-year risk of heart disease!’
In the past 6 months, two of my close friends were diagnosed with high cholesterol and their doctors started discussing statins.
First, an apology for my absence. November and December were crazy—had a gall bladder attack which resulted in surgery and then a virus (not Covid) masqueraded as a surgical complication… It’s been a crazy past two months with a LOT of medical testing. But the good news is things are finally sorted, so I am back to writing.
If you’ve never had a gall bladder attack (and I hope you don’t) here’s one irony: it’s very important to eat a LOW FAT diet. And if you blog about cholesterol and already do that, well, then it’s a waiting game until surgery.
Last week at my annual visit, my cardiologist asked if I’d seen the study that for every hot dog eaten, life is shortened by 30 minutes…
Wait, what?
Not that I eat a lot of hot dogs. Not that anyone with high cholesterol eats a lot of hot dogs. But seriously, what? There’s a MEDICAL STUDY that shows hot dogs lead to earlier death?
It turns out that there WAS a study done. A real one. Which was then written about with the kind of headline known as ‘click bait.’ Which works, obviously, as my doctor mentioned it.
One of the best things you can do to lower cholesterol is to eat less (red) meat AND more greens…but for many of us a vegetarian or vegan diet is too large a shift. One small step that can pay big dividends is to incorporate more ‘plant-based’ (aka vegetarian or vegan) meals into your meal planning.
But I’m often at a loss for vegetarian meal ideas—it just feels so much easier to throw chicken on the grill. So when the New York Times recently launched a newsletter called THE VEGGIE I decided to give it a try.
