Most blood problems are caused by a huge molecule called cholesterol, containing 74 atoms (C₂₇H₄₆O).

Cholesterol is a lipid (fatty substance) that your body uses to create & repair cells walls and create sex hormones (estrogen and testosterone), but here’s the problem:

Typical American blood contains way too much cholesterol.

Triglycerides

Most fats in foods are triglycerides (3 fatty acids attached to a glycerol molecule).

Lipoproteins

Since cholesterol is a fatty substance (lipid), cholesterol doesn’t mix with water and therefore doesn’t mix with blood (which is mostly water).

To let your blood transport cholesterol, your liver creates a package called a lipoprotein, which contains lipids (cholesterol, triglycerides, and phospholipids) attached to proteins. The lipoprotein package does mix with water; it does mix with blood.

LDL is bad, because if it contains more cholesterol than your body needs, it deposits the excess cholesterol onto artery walls. HDL is good, because it carries excess cholesterol away from your body tissues and returns it to your liver for reprocessing or excreting.

So LDL is called bad lipoprotein or, in looser jargon for idiots, bad cholesterol. HDL is called good lipoprotein or, in looser jargon, good cholesterol.

Standards

The government recommends you follow these standards:

4 goals

You have 4 goals so far:

Here’s how to start accomplishing them.…

To reduce total cholesterol, eat less cholesterol. Cholesterol is just in animal products, not plants. The foods that are highest in cholesterol are shrimp, egg yolks, and organ meats (such as liver and kidneys). Some cholesterol is also in other meat, fish, and dairy products.

Also eat less fat in general, since they are triglycerides, and since your liver turns much of the fat into cholesterol. Eating less fat is more important than eating less cholesterol, since most of your blood’s cholesterol comes from the fat you eat. Eating less fat in general also reduces your LDL.

To increase your HDL, get more exercise. The more exercise you get, the higher your HDL count will get.

Kinds of fatty acids

I said that the most common food fats are triglycerides, which contain three fatty acids attached to a glycerol molecule. Those fatty acids can come in two forms: saturated or unsaturated.

Saturated=bad Saturated fatty acids already contain all the hydrogen atoms they can hold. Those fatty acids are bad, since they dramatically increase your cholesterol and increase your LDL.

They’re found in meat and fatty milk products (such as cheese and butter, though also in the solid parts hiding in whole milk, cream, ice cream, and yogurt). They’re also found in tropical oils (vegetable oils that come from tropical plants, specifically coconut oil and palm oil; such oils are nicknamed jungle grease).

At ordinary room temperature, saturated fats are solid, though they melt when heated. (The fat in meat & cheese melt on your stove. Tropical oils melt in the jungle.)

Unsaturated=better Unsaturated fatty acids are missing some hydrogen atoms, are liquid at room temperature, and are healthier than saturated fatty acids.

Unfortunately, foods containing unsaturated fatty acids also contain some saturated fatty acids too.

Summary

How to reduce saturated fat

Although shrimp and egg yolks are extremely high in cholesterol, they’re low in fat (since they contain mainly protein instead). Shrimp and egg yolks are therefore “not so bad,” better for you than meat and fatty milk products. But stay away from liver — which is high in cholesterol and also high in toxins.

Eat chicken and turkey Although chicken and turkey are “meat” (and therefore contain saturated fatty acid), they contain less saturated fatty acid than most beef. Chicken and turkey are therefore healthier.

Here are three more rules about chicken and turkey:

So the healthiest common poultry is skinless turkey breast; the unhealthiest is “chicken leg with the skin on.”

Avoid hamburger If you insist on eating beef instead of poultry, try this: instead of eating hamburger (which is extremely high in saturated fat), eat leaner meats.

The leanest cuts of beef are called round (such as top round, eye of round, and round tip) and loin (such as top loin, sirloin, or tenderloin). London broil can be lean, especially if it’s made from top round beef.

Instead of beef tenderloin, you can try pork tenderloin, whose fat content is similar. It’s the leanest cut of pork.

For hot fast food at lunch, choose a roast beef sandwich (instead of hamburger).

Too bad all those suggestions cost more than hamburger! Those lean cuts of meat contain just slightly more fat than skinless chicken breast — and way less fat than dark chicken meat!

Taste Fat has a lot of taste. Protein has no taste. When you eat beef, the “taste” you enjoy comes from the hidden fat, not the protein.

The more fat, the more taste. The lowest-fat common meat (skinless turkey breast) is also the least tasty. Shrimp and eggs, which are high in cholesterol and protein but low in fat, are also rather tasteless — unless you fry them in butter or some other fat.

Use spices To eat healthily with taste, reduce the fat but add taste back in by using spices. The easiest spice for American kids to accept is black pepper; as you grow up, graduate to red peppers and other spices.

If you accidentally eat too much hot, spicy pepper and want to clear the spice from your mouth, drink milk, because casein (milk’s main protein) binds to the capsaicin (the burning spice in peppers) and draws it away from your tongue. Milk removes spice; water does not.

Another popular “spice,” to wake up tasteless food, is lemon. It’s the secret ingredient in many packaged foods. If you can’t afford real lemons, try bottled lemon juice or orange concentrate or vinegar.

Switch fats If you want to eat fat safely, switch to unsaturated fats (fish and liquid vegetable oils).

Among fish, nutritionists give salmon the highest praise, because it’s very high in omega-3.

Switch milk Whole milk contains 3½ % fat. Although “3½” sounds small, it isn’t: milk is mostly water; of the non-water part of the milk, fat plays a big role.

Use powdered milk I’ve gotten used to skim milk and like it. If you haven’t adjusted to skim milk yet and still think that skim milk tastes too thin, thicken it by stirring in some powdered milk (which is dried skim milk). If you stir in lots of powdered milk, you can make the concoction taste as thick as a milkshake!

The dairy industry tried selling that concoction (which tastes better than skim milk and also contains more calcium & protein) but had to stop when Dan Rather made a poor news judgment: he ran a story complaining that the dairy industry had “altered” the milk. Dan, you ass, it was altered to make it healthier, and it was labeled as such, so why did you have to whine? Maybe you just wanted the labeling to be clearer?

Trans fat

Another kind of fat is called trans fat. It’s a man-made unhealthy menace, created artificially when manufacturers hydrogenate (add hydrogen to liquid oils, to make them more solid and stable, to produce packaged food that has a longer shelf life without turning rancid). Such food is called partially hydrogenated, since it’s never hydrogenated fully.

Trans fat is in partially hydrogenated food such as margarine, pudding, crackers, cookies, potato chips, and fast-food restaurant’s deep fryers (to produce French fries and fried fish). Hydrogenating makes the fat become more saturated and undergo other changes, making the fat less healthy.

Recently, researchers have discovered that trans fat (such as margarine) is even worse for you than fully saturated fat (such as butter). Fully saturated fat does two bad things: it increases your cholesterol and LDL. Trans fat is even worse because it does those two bad things plus a third: it lowers your HDL.

McNuggets At McDonald’s, beware of Chicken McNuggets, which can be extremely high in fat (because they use dark meat and are deep fried). They’re even less healthy than the hamburgers. McDonald’s is starting to sell a healthier kind of Chicken McNuggets, made of white meat (but still deep fried).

How to measure protein

According to physics, heating a solid typically makes it melt. For example, if you heat ice, you get water; if you heat a chocolate bar, you get syrupy goo; if you heat the fat that’s on meat, the fat melts.

But if you cook an egg, the egg does not get softer: it hardens! So does a chicken breast. That’s because an egg and a chicken breast contain lots of protein. When you heat protein, it hardens.

That’s how to tell how much protein food contains: cook the food and see if it gets harder.

Lipitor

Lipitor is a pill you can buy. It’s great: it reduces cholesterol, reduces LDL, and raises HDL.

It’s manufactured by Pfizer (a drug company). “Lipitor” is the brand name; its technical chemical name is atorvastatin. Other “statin” pills made by competitors work similarly.

Blood test If you take Lipitor (or a similar statin pill), you must get a blood test every few months, to make sure the drug isn’t damaging your liver and muscles. To make sure you get that test, the government requires you to get a doctor’s prescription to buy the drug.

Cut in half Lipitor is expensive. Since a 20-milligram pill costs just slightly more than a 10-milligram pill, you can save money by having your doctor prescribe 20-milligram pills and cut them in half. (Warning: though that trick works fine with simple pills, such as Lipitor, never use that trick on time-release pills, since cutting a time-release pill would wreck the timing. If you want to use that trick, buy a pill cutter, to cut the pill in half accurately and easily.)

Grapefruit juice If you take grapefruit juice at the same time as Lipitor, the Lipitor will work more strongly. How much more strongly? That depends on the particular grapefruit, the Lipitor dosage, and the timing between them. Since grapefruit stays in your digestive system for 24 hours, the interaction can be big even if you eat the grapefruit many hours before taking the Lipitor. Since the amount of interaction is unpredictable and dangerous (you don’t want to overdose), doctors recommend you avoid grapefruit juice during weeks you’re taking Lipitor. Lipitor is finally shipping with warning labels saying “no grapefruit juice!”

Canada Lipitor costs much less in Canada than in the US, but Lipitor’s manufacturer (Pfizer) has been refusing to sell Lipitor to Canadian pharmacies that try to resell to the US.