Who knew?

Last spring when I went to my semi-annual cardiological exam, it was preceded, as always, by going to a lab and having blood drawn so that a number of things could be checked. My cardiologist told me that my cholesterol had dropped significantly. “Whatever you're doing,” he said, “keep doing it.”

I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing differently from previous time periods. My wife put her finger on it a couple of days later.

Around the first of the year Mrs. Rhymeswithplague had had an artificial knee installed, and the strong pain medication she took for a while -- sometimes several times a day -- needed to be taken with food. Needless to say, a big weight gain was not what she wanted. So I spread peanut butter on one-half slice of multigrain bread, and she ate that with the medicine, during the day and in the middle of the night as well. To keep her company, I would eat the other half-slice of bread with peanut butter on it.

That is the only dietary change we had made. And goodness knows I was not getting a great amount of exercise. A few weeks after my cardiological exam, I read in a magazine that peanut butter is a natural lowerer of cholesterol.

So if you’re having high-cholesterol problems, you might try that, silly as it seems. It worked for us. According to the magazine, it doesn’t matter whether you use creamy or chunky.

We have continued to eat a breakfast of peanut butter and sugar-free jelly or preserves on multigrain bread, with hot, decaffeinated green tea, two or three times a week, even after my wife no longer needed to take the pain medication.