Mr Bean Holiday Ok.ru

[Janeen Bahrke]

You may be adding annual celebrations to your calendar this time of the year, and many of those gatherings include delicious foods. Holiday encourage events tend to encourage people to overindulge in holiday goodies that often are high in calories and fat. This is because some foods are only served during the holidays, and you want to experience the tastes and memories associated with holiday favorites.

However, what you eat and drink affects your health. This includes your cholesterol and triglyceride levels. If you have a high amount of cholesterol in your blood, your healthcare team may recommend following a cholesterol-lowering diet. High cholesterol could cause your heart arteries to harden, a condition called atherosclerosis, which could lead to coronary artery disease. In addition, hardened arteries may allow a coating called plaque to build up and partially block your arteries. Blocked arteries can lead to low blood flow in the heart and chest pain.

Triglycerides and cholesterol are types of fat, or lipids, which circulate in your blood. Triglycerides store unused calories and provide your body with energy. Cholesterol is used to build cells and certain hormones.

Cholesterol is made mainly by the liver. It also can enter your body in the foods you eat that contain animal fat. Foods that come from animals or contain animal fat include meat, egg yolks, lard and dairy products. The type and amount of fat you eat can influence how much cholesterol your body makes.

Your body makes triglycerides from excess calories, regardless of the calorie source, such as fat, protein or carbohydrates. Triglycerides also are made from excess sugar and alcohol. High triglyceride levels are a risk factor for heart disease.

The average adult will consume more than 4,000 calories during Thanksgiving, including many high-fat items that don't align well with a cholesterol-lowering diet. You can still enjoy the foods you love during the holidays, but you can prioritize and plan to spend your calories and fat intake wisely.

For example, if stuffing with gravy is your favorite, then cut out green bean casserole or white dinner rolls. In addition, you can celebrate the holiday in a healthier way and lower the effect on your cholesterol by making ingredient substitutions. Your meal still can be bountiful and delicious but lower in calories and fat.

"If not prepared with higher-calorie ingredients, you can eat a large volume of them and feel fuller without overconsuming," said Maya Vadiveloo, an associate professor in the department of nutrition and food services at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston.

Not only are they relatively inexpensive, green beans are rich in vitamin C and beta-carotene, an antioxidant that gives fruits and vegetables their color. The vegetable helps fight inflammation and is a good source of folate and potassium, which helps regulate blood pressure. Green beans also are a good source of protein and fiber, which helps lower cholesterol, Vadiveloo said.

Vadiveloo recommends cooking them in heart-healthy oils, such as olive oil, or any non-tropical vegetable oil, rather than fatback. If making a casserole, heavy creams or creamy soups can be replaced with Greek yogurt or low-fat milk. For those who want a little cheese on top, she suggests sprinkling cheese instead of pouring it on.

And to maintain the blood pressure-lowering benefits, "don't put too much salt on them," she said. "Use other seasoning. I like eating them Szechuan style with cayenne pepper. Or dipping raw green beans in hummus."

"If there are things people really, really like, if it's a holiday favorite or something your aunt brought to the table and you really crave it, go ahead and have some," she said. "But balance it out with healthier sides and only take a little."

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All I knew of Passover was what I picked up from the Seder dinner we'd go to on one of the first nights of the eight-day holiday, and in attempting to deepen my observance I simply tried to logic my way out from there. Matzah is part of Passover because, in the Passover story, the Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt didn't have time to let bread rise; so keeping kosher for Passover meant no leavened bread (or baked goods generally), I figured. I did not know the half of it.

My father, an atheist who taught Torah to third-graders in Sunday school, was in the habit of explaining the commandments within the context of the civilization where they'd been developed: the Fertile Crescent of thousands of years ago.

Kitniyot is one of these diasporic improvisations. It's a catchall term for other foods that are prohibited during Passover according to Ashkenazi custom. This includes grains that hadn't been native to the Jews of Egypt or their descendants, like corn and rice (though quinoa, a more recent discovery, may or may not count), and any products derived from those.

There are, in theory, reasons for this. Maybe the rabbis worried that forbidden grains would be mixed into sacks of peas or corn without anyone noticing. Maybe they were confused by the fact that beans swell when water is added to them, even though they're not fermenting. But fundamentally, trying to justify kitniyot is a fool's errand. It makes sense only as a diaspora kludge.

We can try to carve out exception upon exception to rule upon rule, using the law against itself. (Faced with the difficulty that multi-story apartment buildings posed to the rules against operating machines on the Sabbath, the rabbis and the engineers devised a solution: Pressing an elevator button was forbidden, but riding in an elevator programmed to stop on every floor would work.)

We can kvetch about it. (Moses hears a voice from the heavens: "Thou shalt not boil the kid in its mother's milk." "Aha," says Moses, "you mean we can't mix milk and meat during meals!" The voice repeats: "Thou shalt not boil the kid in its mother's milk." "Aha," says Moses, "we have to use separate dishes for meat and milk and wait six hours between the two!" Etc. Finally, the voice sighs thunderously: "Fine. Have it your way...")

It can be hard to grasp that the distinctions among various sects of Judaism (not to mention the wide and growing variety of Jewish practices outside established synagogues) aren't about theology but about observance: how many, and which, rules are followed.

I couldn't join the youth groups my classmates participated in; I didn't know things they considered preschooler-level Judaism. (I didn't know the first line of the most basic Jewish prayer until I was in middle school.)

I owe my Judaism, as I practice it today, to a pair of dear friends I met in college. One was my roommate after graduation and lit the candles with me over Hanukkah; the other took me to High Holidays services and helped me follow along with the Hebrew. Between them, I got an adult crash course in much of what I didn't learn at secularist Sunday school. They teased me, lectured me, and always respected my choices and ideas. I love them dearly. I'm not naming them in this essay because I don't want to offend them if I've mischaracterized them in the following anecdote, but the way I remember it is too good to fact-check:

To orthodox Jews, this is monstrous: a sickness of modernity. They can't abide the idea of Jews going through the motions to serve a deity in whom they may not believe; to them, this is precisely how Judaism gets reduced from a religion to a culture.

But few people are introspective enough to know the precise origins of every trait they've inherited from their parents or been raised with in their homes. People can't always judge what, in their upbringing, was Jewish and what was not.

I love Pope Francis as much as the next nice Jewish girl. But I get frustrated when people who identify as cultural or secular Jews praise Pope Francis's every ambiguous, possibly-poorly-translated offhand comment to the heavens. I get frustrated when progressives with roots in Judaism spend more time litigating whether attention to poverty is a "Christian value" as important as preserving the 20th-century family than they do considering whether they really want progressive "Christian values," or something else.

Look, I can't blame the Conservative Movement rabbis. I can't blame my peers who started eating kitniyot years ago, or who stop observing Passover entirely after the Seder ends. I certainly cannot throw stones here; again, I'm far more Jewish during Passover than I am during any other time of year.

The reasons for getting rid of the kitniyot ban are weak. But there is no good reason to keep it. Judaism isn't ancestor-worship: It cannot be justified simply as an act of following in the footsteps of ghosts. And the fearful rush to protect Ashkenazi culture, fixating on the mortal wound it was dealt by the Nazis, runs the risk of treating it as a culture already dead and just finishing the job.

But I can't help it: I worry about making Passover too easy. Maybe it's just that "kvetching about it" is my preferred way of responding to this particular set of illogical rules: I've managed to learn how to follow them, how hard can it be? What I suspect, though, is that I'm worried about maintaining the upside of orthopraxy: the way an action forces your attention to a thought, or a value.

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