Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from heart attacks without a murmur of protest from the public, the press, or government agencies. Yet the nation’s number one killer can be found right on the American Dinner table.
Diet-Disease Connection
The main culprits are too many fats, especially saturated fats and trans fats, too much cholesterol and not enough soluble fiber. The underlying problem is narrowing, hardening, and, eventually, plugging up of vital arteries that supply the heart with oxygenated blood. This narrowing and hardening process is known as atherosclerosis.
People are born with clean, flexible arteries. They should stay that way throughout life. The arteries of many North Americans, however, are clogging up with cholesterol, fat, and calcium—a concoction that gradually hardens and eventually chokes off needed oxygenated blood.
Heart disease in Japan was so rare after World War II that the School of Medicine at the University of Tokyo had to purchase diseased coronary arteries from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to be able to show Japanese medical students what was then killing every second American. But things changed. As the Western diet gradually replaced the traditional Japanese diet, in time, the Japanese became very self-sufficient. They no longer had to import diseased coronary arteries from America, because they had developed their own. So much so, that today, coronary heart disease is the number one cause of death in Japan.
In Europe just the opposite happened. During WW II, most Europeans were forced to change their eating habits from their customary diet of meat, eggs, and dairy products to a more austere diet of potatoes, whole grains, roots, and vegetables. The result? A dramatic decrease in atherosclerosis-related diseases, such as heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, gallstones, as well as certain adult cancers and arthritis. The marked drop of these disease was felt for as long as 15 years after WW II.
Since then, massive amounts of data--generated by expert-research designers and analyzed by expert-statisticians, and largely funded by the US National Institutes of Health--have accumulated from research on animals and humans around the world. Even though more recently conducted debatable studies have suggested that we should not be so hard on the consumption of meat, eggs, and dairy, the big picture results are essentially the same: diets high in fat and cholesterol, and low in soluble fiber, produce elevated levels of blood cholesterol and heart disease by clogging up the coronary arteries.
Atherosclerosis
People often ask, “How can I know that atherosclerosis is developing in my arteries? Can it be measured?” Yes, sophisticated angiograms can do this. Treadmill testing also may provide us with some clue. But by and large, there simply aren’t any hints of the problem until the arteries are seriously narrowed, or they plug up with a sudden atherosclerotic plaque break off that will then obstruct an artery.
This narrowing process may actually begin as a “fatty streak” in the unborn subject to the diet of the mother. This has been detected with electron-microscopy in autopsy studies of still born babies. Atherosclerosis then is progressive, insidious, stealthy, and systemically affecting all major arteries in the body. Clinically, it can express itself in coronary artery disease, stroke, cognitive losses, vision and hearing impairment, kidney disease, high blood pressure, intermittent claudication (peripheral disease), degenerative disk disease, and in men it can express itself as a main contributor to erectile dysfunction (impotence).
Some people begin to experience angina pectoris (chest/heart pain) upon exertion, which usually suggests at least some 70 percent narrowing of some of the coronary arteries. For many people, however, a heart attack or myocardial infarction is the first sign of trouble. Here the heart muscle is starving for oxygenated blood. When this oxygen cannot be delivered because of either a severely narrowed artery or a sudden obstruction of the artery through a sudden plaque break off, the heart muscle will gradually die from suffocation or asphyxiation. For all too many, the first sign of heart disease may also be their last sign, a massive heart attack with sudden death.