Mark Rutledge: Thank God for fish oil and secret barbecue recipes

After a checkup last year, my doctor said I had dangerously high cholesterol.

“Anyone else in your family have a problem with cholesterol?” he asked.

“I sure hope not,” I said. “We have pork barbecue at every family reunion.”

My mother later confirmed that no one on either side of the family has been plagued with high cholesterol. That leaves only the barbecue to blame.

Before moving to North Carolina, I ate so often at Dixie Barbecue Company in Johnson City, Tenn., the owner announced the birth of my first child on his roadside sign.

My brother, Jeff, who also lives elsewhere now, cooked a pig recently for a large gathering. When he called Dixie to have two gallons of sauce shipped across state lines, the owner said Jeff would be better off just making it himself.

“He told me to mix this, this, this and this, and I'd be real close to his sauce,” my brother boasted.

“What's this, this, this and this,” I immediatedly demanded.

“Can't say,” Jeff said. “He swore he'd kill me and anybody I told.”

“He's killing us anyway,” I insisted.

Then again, if I knew Dixie's secret recipes, I'd probably eat that marvelously lethal stuff all the time.

On my doctor's advice, I modified my diet for three months. It didn't work. Another round of blood tests revealed that my LDL (bad) cholesterol level had jumped from 250 milligrams to 286.

A daily bowl of oatmeal, it turns out, will only make you an expert at cooking oatmeal.

Someone suggested fish oil. When I think of fish oil I remember a guy I used to work with who kept a can opener in his locker. Every day for lunch, he'd mix together a can of dark tuna packed in oil with a can of spinach and eat it with saltine crackers.

That guy was healthy as a horse, of course, but you've never seen anyone more quickly clear a break room — or a bathroom.

Luckily, they produce fish oil in tablet form nowadays. Still doubtful, I resisted for a while. Then I started seeing my face on that sad gray-haired man in those TV commercials for cholesterol-lowering drugs.

“I never thought about cholesterol,” he says, looking like he just lost his best friend. “Then I had a heart attack at 52. What was I thinking?”

I don't want to be on those drugs, so I started loading up on fish oil. For about a year, I've taken two pills with my morning oatmeal and another two at night.

My bad cholesterol level is down to 157, and the triglycerides have dropped as well. Even my doctor is amazed.

“I don't think I have ever seen anyone modify their cholesterol so much without statin prescription drugs,” he said.

They say fish oil doesn't work for everyone, but I'm thinking again about that secret recipe for Dixie Barbecue sauce.

I wonder what would happen if he mixed a little fish oil in with the “this, this, this and this.”

Contact Mark Rutledge at mrutledge@coxnc.com or (252) 329-9575.