To explain heart disease development from virtual non-existence to being the most significant killer disease, I have used statistical trends defining disease development in Britain – a common, modern ‘Great’ nation.
In the year 1800, meat consumption in Britain was about 30 pounds per person per year. 100 years later, meat consumption was nearly 3 times as high, at 90 pounds per person per year. By 1979, it had reached 100 pounds, which is an increase of 725 percent in less than 180 years. These numbers do not include fats. From 1946 to 1978, meat consumption in Britain increased by 90%, and heart attacks rose 24 times. During the same time, fat consumption remained the same, whereas the consumption of potatoes and cereals, which are significant suppliers of vegetable protein, decreased by 38%. Therefore, carbohydrates and fats and vegetable proteins cannot be held to be causes of coronary heart disease. This leaves meat as the main factor accountable for the tense upsurge of this degenerative blood vessel disease.
In addition to the fact that at least 50 percent of the Britain population is obese and most overweight individuals eat much more meat than those with average weight, meat consumption among the overweight must have quadrupled in the 45 years after World War II. Being obese is considered to be a significant risk for heart disease and high blood pressure.
According to research published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1978, the increasing yearly number of heart attacks in the European countries was followed by continuous annual growth in meat consumption by as much as 8 pounds per person. This essentially means that eating practices after World War II have moved from a healthy mixed diet to one extreme in animal protein, but deficient in carbohydrates such as vegetables, fruits, and grains. According to the WHO, fat consumption remained practically unchanged. Atherosclerosis and Heart attacks began to increase dramatically in Britain and industrialized countries soon after the war; today, they cause over 45 percent of all deaths.
Although fat intake among vegans/vegetarians is not less than that among meat-eaters, vegetarians have the least heart-related death rates. The American Medical Association journal stated that a vegetarian diet could dodge 97% of all coronary occlusions. The strangely popular high protein, low carbohydrate South Beach Diet and Atkins Diet have the adverse side effect of starving a person by clogging up his artery walls and a capillary with extreme proteins and significantly limiting his fuel intake (carbohydrates).
This can undoubtedly make a person lose weight, but not without damaging his livers, kidneys, and heart. Both the late Dr. Atkins, an obesity and heart disease victim, and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, a keen supporter of the South Beach Diet and beneficiary of a quadruple bypass, suffered the high protein diet’s consequences. Millions of Westerners are following in their footsteps.
The reason for the virtual deficiency of coronary heart disease among vegetarians is their low intake or total animal protein absence. Fat consumption is, therefore, only an associate of the disease, but not its cause. The constantly salvaged mass hysteria that believes fat, which is generally connected with cholesterol, to be the primary dietary culprit of heart disease, is entirely outdated, unfounded, and has no scientific basis.
