Mummies Revisited

I just read a great article in Scientific American about the mummies with heart disease controversy.  I linked to a story by a journalist, who was quick to blame meat for the heart disease.  I forgot that the original researchers were also astounded that Egyptians who ate a "healthy" diet of grains, vegetables, and very little meat, developed heart disease.

This Scientific American article takes those "surprised" researchers to task and does a very credible job, citing actual evidence, explaining why these mummies had heart disease.

Hat tip: Dr. Michael Eades' tweet on May 20, 2011, that pointed me to the article.

Egyptian Mummies with Heart Disease

Apparently, there are some Egyptian mummies out there with heart disease.  So how did they get heart disease?  According to the "journalists" who wrote the above news story, from eating too much saturated fat and meat.  What idiots!  The Nile River valley and delta is one of the earliest sites for agriculture and a lot of agricultural products were grown and eaten there, plus a fair amount of fish.  The early Egyptian diet is well known, complete with pictures depicting fat Egyptians.  The agricultural products they grew in this lush delta region provided most of what they ate.  To blame the heart disease on meat and fat is to be seriously uninformed about agricultural and Egyptian history.

For the record, saturated fat and cholesterol does not cause heart disease.  In the past few years, numerous scientific studies in prominent medical and scientific journals have thoroughly debunked the cholesterol-in-saturated-fats-causes-heart-disease myth, as have several books.  Want heart disease?  Eat more carbohydrates and become diabetic.  Or smoke cigarettes.  Or lower your cholesterol level too far (in this study, the lowest rates of cholesterol were associated with the highest number of deaths from heart disease).  But stop blaming it on meat and saturated fats.

More Interesting Articles

First off, Gary Taubes has a new article on the link between sugar (either refined or high fructose corn syrup) and obesity, diabetes, and, gulp, cancer.  It is titled, "Is Sugar Toxic?"  I know his next book is on the effects of sugar in the diet and this is a taste of his upcoming work.

Second, can an active (non-sedentary) person get heart disease from eating a diet of grains, fruits, vegetables, and very little meat?  I don't know, but an article on Egyptian mummies with heart disease certainly raises the question.

In an obesity study on rats, a diet high in fat is compared with a diet similar to the high carb, junk food laden American diet.  The junk food diet leads the rats to develop metabolic syndrome, whereas the high fat diet does not.  True, these are rats, not humans, but the results are very interesting nonetheless.

A comprehensive review of "heart healthy diets" (low fat, high carb, and including psychological counseling) over the last several decades concludes that they "had little or no impact on the risk of coronary heart disease mortality or morbidity."  The research was performed by the Cochrane Collaboration, a non-profit group that independently reviews medical research in a non-biased way.  They do not accept monies from pharmaceutical companies or other entities with vested interests in the outcomes of research.  They also review and rate research conducted by other researchers, and they are big proponents of evidence based medicine.