P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

THE SUPERMARKET SWAT TEAM

Have you ever gotten a mental picture of yourself having to take with you into the supermarket an entire SWAT team in order to buy your groceries? First of all, you need a high-speed computer or HP-49G scientific calculator, along with two MIT-trained engineers to run it . . . mathematicians who can instantaneously calculate the fat-to-food ratio of any item on the shelf. Then a couple of guys with huge charts who can tabulate your HDL “good” cholesterol and your LDL “bad” cholesterol, and throw anything out of your cart that jiggers those numbers the wrong direction. Then a few fresh-faced, new-graduate nutritional experts in white coats who will empty their bazookas on any food item you want to buy that has saturated or hydrogenated fat. Then you need to contract with at least three advisors who can help you scour the shelves of Von’s and find you lots of fiber — but as we all know, it’s got to be soluble fiber. Which means you’re back to the people with computers and calculators to make sure you score at least 40 to 45 grams, based on a mathematical model where you divide your weight by five, add 7% depending on what state you live in, minus the square root of pi “R” squared. That’s low-fat pumpkin pie, obviously, garnished with non-dairy soybean whipped cream.

In their marvelous book, Live 10 Healthy Years Longer, authors Jan Kuzma and Cecil Murphey have a little “Ponder This” sidebar, where they say: “A bypass costs about $40,000. How much does it cost to switch to spaghetti and take a walk?” And we might be tempted in reply, “Not much, but to hire that SWAT team of specialists will cost me $40,000 a month in consultants’ fees, and probably deprive me of my cheese enchiladas. As hard as this stuff is, I may as well join those guys who sadly survey the endless choices in the supermarket, and finally just head over to Carl’s, Jr., because ‘Without us, some guys would starve.’” Have you ever felt like that?

Well, friend, we’re right in the very middle of a great health adventure here on the Voice of Prophecy, and spending several weeks sharing with you the exceptional material in this bestselling new book from Word Publishing: Live 10 Healthy Years Longer. But here in Chapter Ten, entitled “Down With Fat and Cholesterol,” is where some of us start to think about moving off the reservation. Good cholesterol? Bad cholesterol? Simple carbohydrates versus complex? Soft fiber or hard? Omega-3 oil and HDL and LDL, as reported in JAMA — that’s the Journal of the American Medical Association. It feels like more alphabet soup than we find in our alphabet soup.

So let me share two bits of good news. First of all, I really urge you to call in or write for this book, because Cecil and Jan take all the numbers, all the acronyms, and give us just eight, simple, usable pages of cholesterol counsel. It’s all stuff we can do. It’s all stuff we can keep track of.

And they do point out that for people who want to live in the happy ranks of the Live-Longer Lifestyle — and get their share of those extra 13 years of life — a good diet is something that you simply do have to pay some attention to. We work for weeks, surfing through a million Internet sites and browsing brochures, sweating the details, before booking a one-week vacation or cruise. Isn’t it worth it to spend a modest amount of homework time in order to eat in a way which would give you a terrific extra decade of life? No, you’re not going to need that SWAT team when you go to Safeway. But in a second sidebar here in Chapter Ten, these two writers tell us:

“If you are a typical American, 37 percent of your calories come from fat — more than twice what you need.” Then they add this: “The diets of most lacto-ovo vegetarians (those who [do] use dairy products) consists of less than 20 percent fat. This helps account for their longer and healthier lives.”

Here’s a good point, which struck us as we read this book ourselves before coming on the air. Yes, it sounds complicated to go around from aisle to aisle in the supermarket, calculating ratios to make sure you get down under 20 percent. But, as Jan and Cecil point out, another way is to simply switch over to a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet. And boom! You’re instantly down under twenty, without having to stress about it while you’re in the store. In one fell swoop — mission accomplished.

A bit later in the chapter, when they begin to tell us about fiber, more numbers come boiling up to the surface. You need 20-25 grams of fiber if you weigh a hundred pounds. Thirty to 35 if you weigh 150. Forty to 45 if you weigh 200. (Most Americans just eat about 12 grams of fiber every day, by the way.) So you think about all those numbers and your eyes glaze over and, speaking of glaze, you give up the cause and reach for a doughnut. But no, look at it this way. Don’t count grams; don’t buy a new calculator. Simply put on your table FOUR servings of whole-grain bread or cereal each day, and FIVE helpings of either fruit or vegetables . . . and all those fiber formulas are instantly resolved. Four of bread and cereal, five of fruit and vegetables . . . done. And you can move on to the next item.

By the way, just so we all know, here’s the good and the bad regarding cholesterol. First of all, the body itself makes cholesterol; that’s one kind. The other kind, called dietary cholesterol, comes from the food we eat — just the animal products, both meat and dairy. Too much cholesterol present in the blood is what leads to fatty deposits and buildup along your arterial walls. That can restrict blood flow, especially if it happens in an artery in the brain; we call that atherosclerosis. A buildup in a coronary artery leads to angina — chest pains — or possibly a heart attack.

Now, the cholesterol numbers are actually easy to keep track of. If your low density lipoprotein number, LDL, or sometimes called your “bad cholesterol” number, is over 200, or especially over 220 . . . that’s not good. The rate of coronary heart disease really climbs when it’s above 220. How do we keep that LDL number under control? Diet and exercise are the best two ways, and this great book by Jan and Cecil has all the details.

HDL — or high density lipoprotein — is your “good cholesterol.” HDL actually removes cholesterol from your cells, so a number 70 and above is good to aim for, because a score that high will protect you from heart disease.

In just our few minutes here, let’s scan some quick tips we can really use, even without that SWAT team. First of all, you want to blacklist saturated fat from your grocery list – especially saturated fat from animal sources – as best you can. Go with unsaturated whenever possible: corn oil, olive oil. And I mentioned already what they call omega-3 oils, which you get in food like nuts, wheat germ, soybeans, and avocados.

Now here’s a very interesting statistic that can pay off for you immediately. If you’re overweight, every two pounds of extra fat you carry means an extra “point” of that bad LDL. Conversely, if you go on a successful diet and lose weight, your good cholesterol, the HDL, can increase by as much as 10%. So you end up winning both coming and going.

Another tip is very much can-do: look around for soluble fiber. Which is good for all colon problems: constipation, hemorrhoids, and diverticulitis. We were remembering an old line from an All in the Family episode, where Edith Bunker, in that screechy “dingbat” voice of hers, told her husband that such-and-such food was really great because it would give him some “roughage.” And Archie replied, very sourly, “At my age, what I could use is more smoothage!” But fiber is really just the new word for “roughage,” and we get it from plant food. Water-soluble is the best kind, they say — and here’s a huge tip. You can drop your bad cholesterol by as much as 30% with one quick move: a cup of oat bran per day. And you say: “A whole cup? That’s impossible!” Jan and Cecil tell us how to do it, though: have a half cup in the morning for breakfast — you can cook it up just like oatmeal. Then later in the day, schedule yourself for two bran muffins. And you’re there. Another trick is to remember to eat the skins of your fruits and vegetables whenever you can — your apples, your pears, potatoes, etc. And, chug-a-lugging back to Chapter Five, we remember that eight glasses a day goes right along with having enough fiber in your diet.

Well, friend, there’s much more — and you do need to get this book. I admit that it feels like we’re a long ways from Eden right now, where Adam and Eve didn’t have charts and graphs . . . they just ate what God put on the trees and plants. We live in a sugary, sinful world, and it takes some work to achieve what was so effortless in Paradise. Don’t despair: we’ll be back in Paradise soon enough. Don’t be in a rush to get there the hard way.