When doing some health-related research I came across a diet-heart-timeline on the diet heart publishing site. A lot of the diet-heart correlations are fascinating.

It turns out that just about everything we have been taught needs to be questioned. Like:

**Too many people on the planet or not enough people on the planet growing food instead of lawns and cities?

1880-1910 The US population is 75 million and one out of 3 people lives on a farm. Today the US population is 300 million and 1% of the population lives on a farm.

**We now eat less than 1/4 the amount of butter that we did in 1910 and disease and obesity are much higher.

1910  Butter consumption = 18 pounds per capita. In the year 2000 it was less than 4 pounds.

**Many people abstain from saturated fat and cholesterol, and yet dietary cholesterol has been shown to have little effect on blood cholesterol.

1937  Columbia University biochemists David Rittenberg & Rudolph Schoenheimer demonstrated that dietary cholesterol had very little effect on blood cholesterol. This has never been refuted, and the restriction of dietary cholesterol in the Dietary Guidelines to less than 300 milligrams a day was taken out of thin air.

**A President’s cholesterol climbs on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet and eventually dies of heart disease. Still no one sees that dietary cholesterol is not related to blood cholesterol and neither is heart disease.

1955  President Eisenhower suffers a first heart attack at age 64. He was put on a highly publicized low fat, low cholesterol diet….His cholesterol continued to climb on a low fat, low cholesterol diet until it reached 259 the day he left office.

**We are told that "high" cholesterol is bad, and yet studies show that low cholesterol correlates to colon cancer.

1974  Framingham Heart Study (24 years). Men with cholesterol levels below 190 mg/dl were three times more likely to get colon cancer as men with cholesterol over 220 mg/dl. In Framingham, there was a strong association between low cholesterol and premature death. Also, there was no relationship between elevated cholesterol and sudden death. You don’t need to be scared! (Some Framingham studies were not published until many years later, giving time for everyone to forget.)


These are just a few tidbits taken from the time-line. It is becoming more and more evident that the diet and lifestyle that we have adopted over the past century is making us sick.

So what are we going to do about it?

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