Oiling the Mechanism of Your Heart
One of the major frustrations in trying to identify specific dietary factors that may affect the health of the heart is that human beings cannot be treated like laboratory animals. Sure, you can get 20 volunteers and add something or subtract something from their diet for six weeks, and you can measure the changes in their serum cholesterol or whatever over that time. But what really matters is how your health and your heart are affected for better or worse, which in practical terms means that you would have to track a group of people for at least five years before any notable trends became obvious. Even more difficult—you would have to figure out some way of making sure that all those people stuck to whatever diet you put them on.
One of the few studies to break through this wall of frustration was designed to clarify the effect of different oils on the heart. Scientists in Finland solved the logistics of such a study by conducting it in mental hospitals, using only long-term patients, whose diet was beyond their personal control, and who could easily be followed for many years. We might add that the fact that this study was carried out in Finland was no accident, since that country has the distinction of having the highest heart attack rate in the world, a statistic usually linked with the high concentration of saturated fats from dairy products, meat and eggs in the Finnish diet.
Tags: diet for heart, health of the heart, oils on the heart, strong evidence that diet