New York City is right on the money in their quest to ban trans fats from restaurants.

For years I had terrible cholesterol numbers. Finally my doctor got after me about it, I paid attention, and I started an aggressive campaign to manage my cholesterol.

First stop, of course, was Google. Within an hour I had solid leads to pursue. My first and obvious question was what was it about my diet that would cause such terrible cholesterol numbers. The Google search gave me an answer very quickly.

I had been the "cookie monster," eating cookies morning, noon, and night. I also ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch almost every day. Guess what? All of that was saturated with partially hydrogenated oils (trans fats).

Read the labels. All the cookies I was eating had partially hydrogenated oils, as well as the peanut butter.

The Google search revealed numerous credible web sites which all agreed that partially hydrogenated oils (trans fats) raise LDL, bad cholesterol, and lower HDL, good cholesterol.

This is critical, because your risk factor is a ratio of total cholesterol to good cholesterol. Raising bad cholesterol while lowering good cholesterol is the worst thing possible, and is what trans fats do, without question.

My risk factor for heart attack/stroke was "highest category."

I banned trans fats from my diet, starting taking the lowest dosage of Lipitor (10 mg) and my cholesterol numbers are now perfect and my risk factor has gone from "highest" to "lowest."

If you want to get your cholesterol under control, ban trans fats from your diet. No more donuts, french fries, blueberry muffins, nothing commercially baked, no fried foods, nothing that you cannot verify is free of partially hydrogenated oils.

I have switched to cookies that do not contain partially hydrogenated oils, and peanut butter that does not contain any. It isn't that hard to do...

take care,

Harry