Thai Food, Cholesterol & LDL (Lovely Thai Ladies)
This is a fantastic tale of the blending of 2 cultures, (Western & Asian). Finally I’m extremely happily married these days (it’s been a glorious amazing 12 months now) to a very good Thai lady and we are both living down in Australasia, mia Thai is 34 and I am looking at 50 later in the year.
Almost annually without fail over the last 20 years I have gone to see the doctor for the full Fasting Triglycerides Cholesterol test. Worrying so each year, I have witnessed the results coming back and the LDL levels (that’s the BAD Cholesterol) creep up and up year by year.
Now the September 2008 Fasting Triglycerides Cholesterol test results were at an all time high, returning LDL levels of 4.3 – (The upper LDL guidance limit here down under is 3.0 or less). So the test result was coming back at a LDL level 43% above the prescribed maximum!!
I not a sporty person at all, but am slim and tall (1.83m and 78 kg) and ate what I had considered and the doctor confirmed was a balanced healthy (but Western) diet.
So anyway, 14 months ago I go up to Thailand to marry mia Thai. I stay in Thailand with her in Korat while we wait for her tourist visa for Down Under to be approved.
Now mia Thai can cook Thai food well, very very well. Mia’s Mum cannot cook good food for peanuts, mia’s friends come around to eat mia’s food – it really is that good.
So I’m living up there, and whilst in Rome you live like the Romans do, so when in Korat you live like the Korat people do – i.e. you eat what they eat and man they enjoy their food very much, chilli hot and spicy.
Never backwards at eating foreign food, I get used to mia’s cooking and eating out Isaan style food twice a day and really learned to enjoy it.
Immigration came through with the visa 2 months after we had married and we sell what belongings mia could sell. Funny how all the friends around say they want this and want that, save it for me, I pay you next week, BUT when it comes to give us the money suddenly no one really wants pretty much anything!!!
Mia is very jai dee (good kind heart) so we started a little down the path of some commercial reality training.
Eventually what was not sold was shipped back home to the village and to her parent’s house, some items stored and some items provided for their use. We go back for 1 month in March 2010 – I shall be amused to see what is left of mia’s ex worldly goods. I am sure we will find her sisters and brothers will have helped themselves to the best of things by now… maybe already sold on EBay by now!!
However now I digress far to far from the main subject, so mia has her first international 12 hour flight down under and we get mia to her new home (my Farang home).
Of course the first meal time comes around and there are no Thai food items in the house! I’ve never cooked Thai food and would not know one end of a bit of Lemongrass or Papaya from the other.
I take mia supermarket shopping, she likes this experience but really the international isles of the larger supermarkets do not stock a wide range of the Thai basic essentials. At various vege stores we are able to locate some coriander and track down some Kaffir Lime leaves.
Then as luck has it, unbeknownst to me, whilst I was up in Thailand some Cambodians had got together and opened a South East Asian store. Mia spots this whilst I am driving (mia does not hold a driving license at that point in time) so we stop and go in. Well bugger me, if the store is not full of everything single item mia Thai would every want to use back at home… I am now guaranteed the best bedtime romp ever – the delicacies stacked up on the shelves bring miaa to salivation point and one of the biggest ever smiles across her face. Needless to say we now shop there every week and I reckon that I get to eat the best Isaan food outside of ….. well, Isaan.
So that was it, plentiful Thai food supplies, a Thai mia who loves to cook and is great at it, it really only took a very short conversation between us to agree that we will eat Thai food twice a day and Farang food only occasionally – like when my children come and visit (although now even they happily eat Papaya salad and small red hot chilli curries pet pet).
The ultimate message I really wish to convey is this: Now after being with mia Thai for 12 months and basically eating only Thai food every day for lunch and dinner things are different.
The fridge is no longer gets stocked up with cheese, cream, yoghurt and all those oily nutty dips you get in the western world.
So in November 2009 it was back off to the doctors for my body's annual Warrant of Fitness and the usual Fasting Triglycerides Cholesterol test. The results came back a day later, and would you know it – the LDL levels (bad cholesterol) was down and within normal tolerance limits.
Unbelievable, astounding, it took a while to see the bigger picture but eventually the penny dropped after thinking it through… it’s all due to eating Thai food every day.
You see it’s the ONLY thing that has changed in my daily life, I still do bugger all exercise…. OK OK OK well the quick thinking will now be saying to themselves “If this guys married a Thai mia he’s found a dud if he is not getting more exercise!!! And yes of course all is perfect in the bedroom department.
I’ve only been looking on this site for less than one week – in that time I have taken so much info from all the submissions and I felt I wanted to give something back.
I feel sure there will be more ramblings from this pen… Possible items may well include how I met my Thai mia, how her integration to western Farang life has gone and my comparisons from many years with Farang women and my newly acquired Thai experience J
Stickman's thoughts:
I ate Thai food for many years and went back Thai a predominantly Western food diet perhaps a couple of years ago. Perhaps some more Thai food wouldn't go amiss?
