I was on a
domestic flight the other day. You can picture the scene, the aircraft has been
flying to different cities thru the day and it has finally arrived to take you
to your destination. You are bored, sitting in your seat, flight still on the
ground, the hordes are entering the aircraft waddling, yes, literally waddling
down the aisle bumping every passenger while making their sweaty way to their
seat. Some cleaning crew in some city has placed a newspaper in the `seat
pocket in front of you’. These phrases I now know by rote, having heard them so
often. Normally these newspapers are such obscure rags that they take all of
thirty seconds to read them. I picked up the paper called Daily Mail, from my
`seat pocket’ and lo and behold, a headline screamed at me, a “Ghee Cuts its
fat but don’t binge yet”!!! This seemed too good to be true.
We all know how
bad cholesterol is. I am not going down the route that the body needs and makes
its own cholesterol and so on and so forth. Neither am I getting into the good cholesterol
HDL and bad cholesterol LDL distinction. Let’s just believe that it’s a killer as
you have been told. What many people do
not know is that cholesterol only, repeat only, exists in animal produce.
So meat, eggs,
milk, cheese, ghee, paneer, dahi [dairy products] do have cholesterol. Olive
oil, groundnut oil, rapeseed oil, mustard oil don’t have cholesterol either.
Neither do nuts. These are not animal products so they do not have cholesterol.
By the same token, water, soft drinks, juices, bread also do not have cholesterol,
even though packaging seems to suggest that they are cholesterol free
consequent to some manufacturing process. So being vegetarian has got nothing
to do with ingesting cholesterol as most vegetarians, especially in India, have
large quantities of dairy all of which has cholesterol. If you are a vegan you
are probably not ingesting cholesterol.
I read the
article, complete with beautiful photographs of a delicious layered flaky
paratha. The article states that the National Dairy Research Institute has
developed a low cholesterol ghee. Ghee being an animal product has loads of cholesterol
so this creation of low cholesterol ghee seemed like really brilliant alchemy.
It turns out that the researchers have added a chemical called
beta-cyclodextrin to reduce the cholesterol. I am not a chemist, but my
understanding is that cyclodextrin is used in weight loss products as well as an
additive to foods. It seems that fats stick to cyclodextrin which then means
that the fats cannot be absorbed by the body. The cyclodextrin with the fat
attached is excreted from the body. Assuming my understanding is broadly
correct, you would be visiting the bathroom very often if you do eat cyclodextrin.
Not very pleasant if you ask me.
My point is that
cholesterol is bad, eating too much ghee is bad, no argument on that. If you
are sensible, do you really need to eat that much ghee? Secondly, how much
sense does it make to replace bad cholesterol in ghee with another chemical
that is none too pleasant anyway? Why do we have to be so undisciplined? Why
not just eat ghee a little more judiciously and not get into adding more
chemicals into our bodies.
In case you
really cannot stay away from the ghee, the low cholesterol version is
available. Have a look at this site.
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