"Thanks to the Ten-Year-Old with High Cholesterol, We're All Eating Healthy Now"

For years, the Levi family from Gedera lived a 'normal' lifestyle that included high-fat family meals. However, a blood test for their 10-year-old son, Stav, changed everything: when it was revealed that Stav had high cholesterol, the whole family decided to band together to help him and adopt a healthy diet at home.

"After the discovery, I was referred to a nutritionist who gave me a plan, and suddenly, all the foods we used to eat at home without considering cholesterol had to change. We had to make a switch," Stav recalls in an interview with 'Yedioth Ahronoth'. "It started because of me, but the result was that the whole family made a positive change. To be honest, today we all eat healthier food with lower fat percentages. And suddenly, we discovered that this led to more variety on our table.

"Mom and Dad also learned to prepare a lot more food for us. Dad makes the best pizza in the world and switched to using whole wheat flour instead of white flour, and even the yellow cheese he sprinkles on top is now 9% fat instead of 28% like before, even though we never really paid attention to the fat percentage on packages. Mom always makes sure there are all kinds of vegetables in different colors on the table, and everyone tastes what they like. It's much more than what used to be on the table for weekday dinners. And by the way, we even make sushi ourselves at home with the kids."

The parents - Maayan (39) and Gal (40), and the children - Roy (12), Stav (10), and Moran (5 and a half) - all embraced the change with a smile, and no one felt they were missing anything from their previous eating habits. Quite the opposite. "Stav's visit to the nutritionist opened all our eyes. We all changed our habits, which included consuming high-fat products without really thinking about it," says Maayan, the mother. "Today, during supermarket shopping, we check the fat percentages in products, the bread is made from whole wheat and not white, we don't use canola oil but only high-quality olive oil, and if we used to order pizza from outside, now we prefer to make it at home. For several months now, we have been enjoying a healthy family dinner together, and it's a real treat."

Stav shares that they had a regular routine each week when Grandma came to visit: "She used to treat us with pizza delivery to the house, but now we taught Grandma that we’re giving up that treat and prefer the taste of Dad’s pizza. There's no doubt that Dad has developed his cooking skills, and we kids have learned to cooperate and help him. It's a lot of fun."

But beyond the fun, the results speak for themselves: within just a few months, Stav lost weight, grew taller, and his blood fats significantly decreased. Another great thing the family adopted is that during meals – there’s no TV or other screens. "We talk about things that happened during the day and the plans we want to make together in the future, like a trip," sums up Maayan.