You Can’t Blame McDonald’s for This…
1 min read
Everyone wants to blame McDonald’s and their Super-Sized fries for America’s obesity problem. Luckily for me, I can now eat the 550 calorie Big Mac knowing that my eating habits are not the culprit for my clogged arteries. It has always been thought that heart disease was caused by unhealthy lifestyles, but thanks to science, McDonald’s is in the clear–for now.
In a recent scientific study it was found that 137 mummies, from four different regions, were CT scanned and results from these scans showed that the mummies had calcified plaque in the walls of their arteries. The testing of all 137 mummies proved that statistically, a person living thousands of years ago, is just as like to have a cardiovascular disease as those alive today.
Dr. Greg Thomas, cardiologist and senior member of the study, concluded that:
“We’ve oversold the ability to stop heart disease. We can slow it down, but to think we can prevent it is unrealistic.”
For more on this subject, check out Nature.com’s article Mummies reveal that clogged arteries plagued the ancient world, or check out Dr. Thomas’ findings at The Lancet. (You have to pay to read more than the first few paragraphs.)
I read this too some where else recently although I think as someone else pointed out these guys would have been upper class, not doing physical labor, and probably eating a diet that was much higher in fat than average people of the day. None the less it is something to think about.
Good memory! You are correct. When they originally did the study a few years ago, they did come to this conclusion…which is why they did this new study. The four groups of mummies that they tested were the average person. The following is from the article that I linked:
“The team previously had found atherosclerosis in a population of ancient Egyptians, but experts, including Rosalie David at the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology in Manchester, UK, argued that these were elite individuals, who probably ate a rich diet rivalling that of modern gluttons4.
“Now we’ve scanned the common man and woman and they’ve got the same disease,” says Thomas.”