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STORY OF CHOLESTEROL

After the war, Keys en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys turned his attention to other challenges. He was intrigued by statistics from food -starved Europe that showed a dramatic decrease in deaths from heart disease, whereas many prominent American men were dropping from heart attacks. Why did some men get heart attacks and other didn’t? Keys recruited 281 Minneapolis-area men aged forty four to fifty five into long term study of how sixty different characteristics, including diet, affected their risk for heart attacks.

While the Minnesota study was under way, Keys traveled the world, talking about heart disease. When a colleague from Naples claimed that it was not a major problem there, Keys was skeptical, and went to investigate. Studying a group of Neapolitan firemen, he found much lower level of cholesterol in their blood than in American businessmen. He discovered the same was true of poor people in Spain. To Keys the correlation was obvious -- richer people were eating diets rich in fats and having more heart attacks.

But medical colleagues were skeptical of the links between diet, serum cholesterol, and heart attacks. So Keys and collaborators organized an unprecedented, large-scale international study of heart disease risks in more than 12,000 men from various parts of the world Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Finland and Netherlands, Japan and the United States -- with very different diets. The ‘Seven Countries’ study was launched in 1958, and the men were to be examined every five years

In 1963, results were obtained from both studies. After following the Minnesota businessmen for fifteen years, Keys identified one major risk factor for heart disease: serum cholesterol levels. Men with levels greater than 200 milligrams of cholesterol per 100 milliliters of blood had five times the heart attack risk of those with levels below 200. …. Page 76