Low-Fat Way to Health for Americans
Why is the epidemic of heart disease particularly strong in the U.S.A.? If you are the average American, your diet is probably unbalanced and is very likely to lead you towards obesity, regardless of whether you know it or not. Drs. Louis Katz and J. Stamler, prominent researchers in this field, called it “a pernicious combination of over-nutrition and under-nutrition -excessive in calories, carbohydrates, lipids and salt; and frequently substandard in certain critically important amino acids, minerals and vitamins.” This makes sense, since the study of nutrition, which is relatively new to the medical field, has focused almost entirely on not having enough nutrition until recent years. People have been encouraged to “eat the right foods” and to provide plenty of meat, eggs, milk, and cheese for their children. In most areas of the world, the problem of getting enough food to eat for nourishment and survival is still existent, but this is not the problem in America. Our problem is actually more like the opposite: eating too much, especially the foods that are bad for us. Our diet is high fats, calories, refined sugars and starches, while low in essential nutrients, minerals and other vital supplements. The relationship between the amount of fat in your diet and the amount of cholesterol produced in your body is still not very clear. Research disagree on some points, but all one aspect of the problem, though, we all concur: the cholesterol found in the blood is produced mainly in the liver from fats in the diet. It is also believed that cholesterol is produced in the arterial walls themselves, but the main source and the one that we can to a definitely monitor is fat in our food.
What is the situation in other countries of the world? We have research that supports the big difference in the health of Americans and people in various other countries lies in their diet. For example, in Norway, during the war years of 1940-1945, the consumption of butter, milk, cheese and eggs (which are all high in fats) had to be decreased substantially. Did the reduction of fat content in the country’s diet prevent heart attack deaths? The Norwegian Ministry of Health, which kept accurate records, answered that question with an emphatic “yes.” With the reduction in fat consumption, the death rate from also coronary attacks was reduced. The Norwegians reported that deaths related to heart disease dropped by 31% each year among the urban population. In addition, there was a 22% decrease in heart disease-related deaths among the rural population. France, which also to ration high-fat content foods during the war years, had similar results. Mr. Marcel Moine, from the French Ministry of Health, reported to me that from 1941 to 1945, when the French population was on a low-fat diet, the death rate from heart disease was reduced to an average of 20.6 for each 100,000 persons. In the postwar years, when the diet returned to normal fat consumption, the death rate rose to 25.5 per 100,000, which was the death rate prior to the war. Italy is another example, in which they studied two neighboring provinces. In one neighborhood the daily diet included pork products (which are usually high in fat), the rate of heart disease ended up being much higher than in the neighboring town where the population followed the comparatively low-fat diet of the country as a whole. Related studies have been conducted in all across the world-countries such as Finland, Denmark, South Africa, China, and Japan. Statistically, the results all reveal the same conclusion: high-fat diet means a high rate of heart deaths. Famous celebrities, as Mark Twain and Marilyn Monroe have shown, sometimes have a way of giving us a false image, by misunderstanding cause and effect relationships where the health of whole populations is concerned. For example, you could claim, on the basis of statistics, that since the use of soap was also sharply reduced in some countries during the war, with a corresponding drop in death rate from heart disease, the soap (which is a fat) was the underlying cause of the disease. In a more scientific perspective, however, the evidence weighs heavily on the side of fat consumption as the primary factor in causing atherosclerosis.
Is the epidemic confined to older people? What has happened to our way of life to make men between 30 and 45 the preferred victims of the “silent killer” that strikes without warning? And why are more and more young women, long believed to be virtually immune to this disease until after menopause, now falling prey to it?We do not know the entire answer to this enigma, or even whether there is a single answer. But research that has been carried on by my colleagues throughout the world, and by myself during the past 10 years, has provided some valuable clues.Only recently, we discovered to our amazement that over 90 per cent of our adult population has, to a greater or less degree, a degenerative disease of the arteries that doctors call atherosclerosis. That, as you know, is the term meaning the thickening and narrowing of certain vital blood vessels. It is the way in which the stage is set for heart attacks and strokes.Medical people once thought that it was a result of aging, but the disease is now being found in infants and children. As children, however, we have the power of absorbing the fatty deposits that attach themselves to the artery walls. As we grow older, we seem to lose this power of absorption. That is when the real trouble begins. At what age does this happen? Much earlier than we might expect.
For example, my associates and I studied the arteries of 600 patients who had died from various diseases. Approximately 100 of them had met sudden death from accidents or acute illness. To our amazement we found that atherosclerosis, a disease of the arteries, was present in many of the young people before they had reached their thirtieth birthday. By the time they were near the mid-century mark, the fatty deposits and embedded crystals of cholesterol were already in the artery walls. Such thickening and narrowing of the blood vessels obstructed the nourishment and blood flow to the tissues in the heart, brain, or kidney. Similar evidence from autopsies also came from Korea, where Army doctors autopsied 300 American soldiers who had died while serving there. It was the first time such a study had been made of a cross section of the country’s youth; their average age was only 22. A report of the autopsies revealed shocking information: 77% of the young U.S. servicemen already had atherosclerosis! Furthermore, this data was weighed against the mere 11 incidence of the same disease among Koreans and Orientals who had lived and fought in the same environment under the same conditions.
Does heredity have anything to do with the problem? You might wonder: why do some people have more cholesterol in their blood than others? There is not enough evidence regarding this topic to give a confident answer, but there is information known of some influential factors, such as heredity. Some families are affected by what physicians call hereditary familial hyper-excessive cholesteremia. These families the tendency of having or developing high levels of cholesterol in the blood is passed on throughout their generations. In such families, we often are able to discover quite an additional number of individuals who suffered from heart attack and strokes as well. If you do not have history of heart attacks or strokes in your family, you are lucky to have at least one protective factor from this disease. Another important factor, which is totally in your hands, is how you eat and how much you eat. While it is not in our control to choose our parents, we do have control over our diet. By avoiding foods high in fat and cholesterol, we can help reduce the effect of any negative inheritance.
Women have better natural protection against atherosclerosis. If you are female, you are less likely to suffer from a heart attack or stroke until after you pass 50 years of age. After that, your protective female hormones give out, and you become at the same risk to the disease as men. Can men take female hormones to protect themselves? They can, but if they do, they will develop a high voice, full enlarged breasts, and other feminine characteristics. Needless to say, this solution brings more problems than it solves. Can anything else help? Yes, there is something that everybody can do without much trouble, and still get the benefits of improving their overall general health. In fact, it’s also very simple: choose foods and eat meals that will keep your blood fats down to normal levels.
Can you reverse damage done to your arteries by excessive fat? Only recently have medical research teams produced dependable evidence supporting that excessive fat in our diets increases the risk of heart disease. If you are past the age of thirty, you have probably already started wonder whether the harm done to your arteries is permanent, or if it is reversible. Right now, as our current level of research, we doctors cannot answer the question with certainty. However, we can convey the hopeful fact that experiments have shown that the condition is reversible in animals. We have data that verifies cholesterol in the arteries is absorbed in adolescents, as proposed by Dr. Russell Holman and others. However, this metabolic gift disappears as we age. There are many qualified experts in this field who hypothesize that since atherosclerosis is reversible in animals, the same can be true for humans as well. However, we should be careful when drawing conclusions from animal testing, as their metabolism is quite different from ours.
Another question that patients often ask me is: “Can you tell me whether I am already a victim of degenerative artery disease?” Unfortunately, we do not as yet have a test that can predict with certainty whether you are susceptible to coronary disease, or are likely to have a heart attack. One fact, however, is certain: if laboratory tests show that you have an excessive amount of cholesterol in your blood, your chances of avoiding heart and blood vessel disease, which can lead to heart attack or stroke, are much smaller. You are then much more susceptible. If you are over 30 years of age, you ought to have your physician include such a measurement of cholesterol level in your routine check-up. Too many men in the dangerous middle years are so busy playing for high stakes in the fast-moving game of life, that they forget that “hearts are trumps.”
What is the solution for us? There have been numerous studies on heart disease, but none have concluded that it is due to diet alone. However, they do emphasize much of the information that I have acquired in my 25 years of practice and laboratory research. Together, these trials and studies are evidence that strongly support this fact: If everyone in the United States would reduce his/her fat intake by 25 percent, we can cut the number of heart-disease related deaths in half within two decades. Not only will it prevent deaths, but it will indefinitely improve the overall well-being and general health of the population. Now, you may be wondering “How can I go about reducing the fat in my diet? Where do I begin?” In my articles you will find a helpful guide; it includes low-fat meal plans and directions for using simple and inexpensive nutritional supplements that I use in my own practice to help my patients prevent heart attack, and to treat those who have already experienced one or more. If you follow these directions carefully, you will not only add years to your life, but life to your years.
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