The answer seems to be yes. For the longest time, we thought the answer was no. Experts said to not eat eggs everyday, especially not the yolks, because they are full of cholesterol. And eating too much cholesterol would increase the amount of cholesterol in your blood. 

However, the body produces cholesterol. And when we eat cholesterol, the exquisite machinery that is our body makes less of it to keep the level in our blood relatively stable. According to a recent interview by an NPR reporter on a US government panel looking at making new diet recommendations:

"AUBREY: ... A lot of us grew up thinking eggs were a no-no, right? Back in the 1970s, that's when experts first started making links between heart disease and diet. And that's when dietary cholesterol was really fingered as a problem. Now, cholesterol is found in animal products - meat, eggs, cheese, butter. And the thinking was that the amount Americans were eating was responsible for the increasing prevalence of heart disease.

"SIEGEL: And what's happened now?

"AUBREY: Well, in short, as researchers have continued to study this, they've concluded that there's really not strong evidence to support the idea that eating a lot of cholesterol in foods leads directly to higher amounts of bad artery-clogging cholesterol in our bloodstreams.

"In fact, the American Heart Association changed its policy on dietary cholesterol in 2013, citing insufficient evidence on this link. And that's the new science that the dietary guidelines committee is responding to. Now, I should point out that their final report has not been released yet, so the details of their message on cholesterol is just not clear yet."


The Atlantic Monthly's health and medicine blogger James Hamblin explains that these recommendations reflect a comprehensive change in what experts believe is good in terms of food for good health.

"The 15-person advisory committee's new recommendations are emblematic of an essential ongoing shift in approaches to eating: focusing on whole foods, as opposed to avoiding or endorsing specific macronutrients (carbs, fat, or protein). Where nutrients are mentioned in the committee's recommendations, there are a few notable moves. Cholesterol in food is no longer cause for concern—vindicating the once-forsaken egg yolk and its arbitrary "62-percent daily value" of cholesterol, as current nutrition labels read. Only certain kinds of dietary fat (trans and saturated) are to be minimized, and whole grains are—starkly counter to the national trend in low-carb and gluten-averse ideologies—second only to fruits and vegetables as the most "health-promoting" foods that a person can eat."

This panel convened by the U.S. Depts. of Agriculture and Health and Human Services also recommends we eat less red meat and processed meat, less sugar-added food and drinks, and less refined sugar in general -- recommendations we have in fact made here on this blog many times. Interestingly, we're to eat more seafood too.

Perhaps the most controversial recommendation -- well, the one that got the acclaim and the headlines in the media anyway -- is the one that says we can eat food that is filled with cholesterol. This is probably because experts acknowledge our bodies will adjust how much cholesterol is made available in our blood based on much cholesterol we eat. That is why, according to newer science, eating eggs is all good.

I'm proud to introduce "Lose Weight the Healthy Indian Way", a simple guide on how to lose excess body fat. You'll find practical advice based on science and easy to adopt. No complicated meal plans. No strict diet rules. 

Just guidelines and tips that when followed fairly consistently for 6 weeks will help you lose excess body fat. You'll learn secrets like:

* The best approach to aerobic exercise, an approach that will save you time and increase how effective your efforts are

* What carbs are actually bad (not all of them are!)

* Being a perfectionist is the worst thing to strive for

"Lose Weight the Healthy Indian Way" is currently available by Amazon Kindle (the device and the app, which can be downloaded for free on your Apple, Android, and Microsoft devices). We plan to make this available on other formats too. If interested, please email us at info@healthyindiandiet.com. 

Our book "The Healthy Indian Diet" turned 3 years old in 2014! Thousands of people like you picked up a copy and got something useful for life out of it. We've in fact heard from many of you, and it's been encouraging to hear how the book has helped change lives in small ways and big.

If you haven't read our book before, you should know the book is divided into two parts. 1st comes the science. About that part, one reader says:

"I thought this book was a very interesting read. The first part of the book focuses on the science of diseases that can be affected by diet and breaks down food and how it affects your body. I feel like the author did a really good job of putting in details but still making the book understandable for a regular person."

The 2nd part is the cookbook full of wonderful recipes. Says another reader:

"The Healthy Indian Diet has now become a staple in our home-cooking reference library and repertoire. We love South Asian food and are vegetarian. Raj's informed approach to nutrition and food is an excellent guide to developing quick, nutritious and balanced meals with exciting South Asian flavors. The lima bean curry has become a favorite of ours - quick, tasty and super easy to prepare! ..."

We've had many satisfied readers, such as this one who says:

"Reading the book has helped us make healthier choices while still enjoying the richness of Indian food. The book carries recipes, but it's not a traditional cook book. Any one book that covers Indian food as diverse as dosas, Bengali fish curry, and Gujarati daar, would have to be five times larger to be comprehensive. Instead, the book seems to aim towards providing a sampling of recipes that along with the explanations in the first half, give readers the tools necessary to make adjustments to all of their dishes. The book has been helping my wife and me make appropriate adjustments to our mother's recipes so we still enjoy the foods that we grew up with but in a more healthy way."

We hope you are encouraged to pick up our book. Even if not, we hope you are encouraged to have a better 2015!

To get a free sample of "The Healthy Indian Diet," go to the Amazon webpage and click "Look Inside". You can buy this book in paperback or for the Kindle off Amazon, and it's available for other formats too.

My friend Amee runs a great site called RabbitFoodRocks. Funny, poignant, and full of wonderful recipes, I recommend you check it out if you want to try something new. Even if you're not a hard-core vegetarian. After all, even meat-lovers must eat their plants.

Here's a wonderful recipe for a hearty meal perfect for the wintertime when it’s cold outside. You will need a slow cooker (which is an awesome thing to have if you’re the busy type that isn’t too fond of cooking).

What I like about this recipe is it contains some basic ingredients in the Healthy Indian Diet: lentils which pack fiber with a decent amount of protein and a variety of vegetables which are full of nutrients. We modified Amee’s recipe a little by adding our own spices, not using celery, and using extra virgin olive oil. (That's my beautiful wife's hand mixing the dal in the photo to your left.) 

That’s part of the beauty of this recipe: it’s versatile, you can do it how you like, and there’s no way to mess it up. It’s also filling and smells and tastes great!

Ingredients and directions for Amee's Lentil Vegetable Stew recipe are reprinted below just as written on the original place she first posted her recipe. Enjoy!

Slow Cooker Lentil Vegetable Stew

Ingredients:

1 cup brown lentils
4 cups water
2 Tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 cup finely diced celery (with leaves if you can!)
1 cup finely diced onion (yellow or white)
1/2 cup finely diced carrot
1/2 cup finely diced sweet potato
2 bay leaves
1 Tablespoon Better than Bouillion
1 15-oz can diced tomatoes
2 packed cups of chopped kale
1/4 cup chopped parsley

Directions:

1. Plug in slow cooker and set to 4-6 hrs of cooking time.  (At the four hour mark, the lentils should be tender to the bite, but the acidity from the tomatoes impedes cooking time of the lentils…you shouldn’t need more than 6 hrs).  Add the water and the lentils to the crockpot [slow cooker].

2.  Heat oil in a sautee pan on medium high heat, and saute the onions, celery, carrots, sweet potatoes, and bay leaves.  Cook for about 4 minutes and remove from heat.  Add the sauteed vegetables, the tomatoes, and the bouillon to the slow cooker.  Cover.

3.  After 4- 6 hours, wilt in the kale and parsley, and serve with crusty french bread or crackers.

I want to share a recent essay by Nina Teicholz published in the Wall Street Journal (she wrote the popular book "The Big Fat Surprise"). You may be able to read the whole essay by clicking here. Or you can search "Last Anti-Fat Crusaders" on Google and click the link. 

Moving on, the hook of Ms. Teicholz's essay is that a top scientist advising the US government on nutrition policy had said that low-fat diets are "probably not a good idea". In her opinion, this constitutes a shocking admission because for decades now the US government has blamed fats for heart disease and other ills and continues to promote low-fat diets. 

To this day and every year, a large number of Americans strive year to eat low-fat foods. This despite a retreat on the anti-fat message in some quarters, such as Harvard's school of public health.

Why the retreat? Because low-fat foods are the problem people!   

"By the turn of the millennium, however, clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were showing that a low-fat regime neither improved our health nor slimmed our waistlines," she writes.

As I have written about in this blog before, a lot of scientific evidence generated in the last 1-1/2 decades, evidence published in respected journals, consistently show that low-fat diets do not reduce one's risk for deadly heart-related events or one's tendency to gain weight. 

Truth is most scientific trials on diets that compare low-fat to low-carb diets show that low-carb diets outperform low-fat diets when it comes to improving people's health. Writes Ms. Teicholz:

"[A] low-carbohydrate regime consistently outperforms any other diet in improving health. Diabetics, for instance, can most effectively stabilize their blood glucose on a low-carb diet; heart-disease victims are able to raise their 'good' HDL cholesterol while lowering their triglycerides. And at least two-dozen well-controlled diet trials, involving thousands of subjects, have shown that limiting carbohydrates leads to greater weight loss than does cutting fat."

This is something worthwhile to keep in mind when come this January 1st when you decide to change your diet. Cheers and have a wonderful new year!

My friend Amee Meghani runs a great vegetarian food & recipe site called RabbitFoodRocks. At times funny, at times poignant, and always full of wonderful recipes, I recommend you check it out if you want to try something new. Even if you're not a hard-core vegetarian. After all, even meat-lovers must eat their plants.

Here's one wonderful recipe from her site I like because it highlights some things we talk about here on Healthy Indian Diet: eating a variety of vegetables is good, adding spices like turmeric to what we eat makes it better, and cooking in butter or ghee is absolutely okay. And it must taste good!

Ingredients and directions for Amee's oven-baked cauliflower recipe are reprinted below just as written on the original place she first posted her recipe. Enjoy!

Oven-Baked Indian Cauliflower Curry

Ingredients:

1 head cauliflower
2 Tablespoons ghee or butter
2 Tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 serrano pepper, seeded, minced
1 onion, finely diced*
1 inch fresh ginger root, grated
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon garam masala
1 teaspoon salt
1 can of petite diced tomatoes, pureed
2 Tablespoons chopped cilantro (optional for garnish)

Naan, flatbread, tortillas, or cooked rice for serving (optional)

Directions:

1.  Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Trim the cauliflower into 1-inch chunks.  Stalks are great – use them too! The important thing is that the cauliflower pieces are close to the same size as each other. You want them to bake at the same rate. Rinse and set aside. 

2.  Combine cumin, coriander, turmeric, cayenne, and garam masala in a small bowl.

3.  Make the sauce (masala): Heat oil and butter/ghee in a wide deep saucepan or skillet over medium-high heat. Add minced serrano and diced onion and sautee until onions are almost translucent. Add the ginger and garlic and cook for 2 minutes, stirring frequently, making sure the onions and garlic don’t burn. Then add your spices. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes, stirring continuously.  Now add the salt and pureed tomatoes. Cook for about 2 to 3 minutes and remove from heat.

4.  In a large bowl combine cauliflower and the sauce.  Mix well, making sure all nooks and crannies are covered with the sauce.

5.  In a lightly greased casserole dish or pyrex dish, spread the cauliflower in one shallow layer.  Loosely cover with foil.  Bake on the middle rack for 35 minutes**.  Then uncover and Broil on HI for 10 minutes, but be sure to watch it closely, because broil results can vary significantly.  The purpose of broiling is simply to crisp up the florets a little. They’ll turn brown–that’ll be the crispy part!–but we don’t want them to burn.

6.  Garnish with chopped cilantro. Serve with naan (or flatbread or tortillas), rice, or on its own (gluten-free!)

Let's continue our closer look into a clinical diet trial that made a big splash 1-2 weeks ago. Click here to see my 1st blog post on this trial.

We will continue with this passage from the NYT article on this diet trial: