Tuesday, January 10, 2012

You Could Learn A Lot From A Mummy

The BLUF:  before sugar, before transfats, before fast food, before high fructose corn syrup became the source of 20% of our caloric intake, before mean people began forcing us to eat processed foods carefully dosed with sugar-fat-salt ... the mummies were getting heart disease.

I hope it won't seem too radical to suggest that you'd be a dummy to eat like a mummy.

Sorry, I just had to ...

The study concludes:

Forty-four of 52 mummies had identifiable cardiovascular (CV) structures, and 20 of these had either definite atherosclerosis (defined as calcification within the wall of an identifiable artery, n = 12) or probable atherosclerosis (defined as calcifications along the expected course of an artery, n = 8). Calcifications were found in the aorta as well as the coronary, carotid, iliac, femoral, and peripheral leg arteries. The 20 mummies with definite or probable atherosclerosis were older at time of death (mean age 45.1 ± 9.2 years) than the mummies with CV tissue but no atherosclerosis (mean age 34.5 ± 11.8 years, p < 0.002). Two mummies had evidence of severe arterial atherosclerosis with calcifications in virtually every arterial bed. Definite coronary atherosclerosis was present in 2 mummies, including a princess who lived between 1550 and 1580 BCE. This finding represents the earliest documentation of coronary atherosclerosis in a human. Definite or probable atherosclerosis was present in mummies who lived during virtually every era of ancient Egypt represented in this study, a time span of >2,000 years.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1936878X11000660

HT:  @dreades

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