"Heart Disease Starts in Childhood"
It was this landmark study published in 1953
that radically changed our view
about the development of heart disease forever.
A series of 300 autopsies
performed on U.S. battle casualties of the Korean War,
average age, 22.
22 years old, but 77% of their hearts had gross evidence,
meaning visible to the eye evidence,
of coronary atherosclerosis, hardening of their arteries.
Some of them had vessels that were clogged off 90% or more.
As an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded,
"This widely cited publication dramatically showed"
"that atherosclerotic changes appear in the coronary arteries"
"years and decades before the age at which"
"coronary heart disease (CHD) becomes a clinically recognized problem",
before symptoms arise.
Follow-up studies on the hearts of thousands more soldiers
over the subsequent years confirmed their results.
How young does it go?
Fatty streaks, the first stage of atherosclerosis,
was found in the arteries of 100% of kids by age 10.
What's accounting for this buildup of plaque even in childhood?
In the 80s we got our first clue:
the now famous Bogalusa heart study
looking at autopsies of those dying
between the ages of 3 years old to age 26,
and the #1 risk factor was cholesterol.
You could see the stepwise increase
in the amount of their arteries covered in fatty streaks
as the level of bad cholesterol in the blood increased.
As powerful as this was, this was only looking at 30 kids.
So they decided to study 3000.
3,000 accidental death victims, ages 15 through 34.
After thousands of autopsies,
they were able to produce a scoring system,
able to predict advanced atherosclerotic lesions
in the coronary arteries of young people.
The higher your score, the higher the likelihood
you have these lesions growing in your heart.
So, if you're in your teens, twenties, early thirties
and you smoke, your risk goes up a point.
If you have high blood pressure
at such a young age, that's 4 points.
If you're an obese male, 6 points,
but high cholesterol was the worst.
If your non-HDL cholesterol,
meaning your total cholesterol minus your good cholesterol,
is above like 220,
that's like 8 times worse than smoking.
So, let's say you're a young woman
with relatively high cholesterol,
but you don't smoke, you're not overweight,
your blood pressure and blood sugars are fine.
At your sweet 16 there's just a few percent chance
you already have an advanced atherosclerotic lesion in your heart.
But if you don't improve your diet,
by your 30th birthday,
there may be like a 1 in 5 chance you have
some serious heart disease.
And if you have really high cholesterol
it could be closer to 1 in 3.
Bringing your cholesterol down
to even just that of a lacto-ovo vegetarian
and you're down to here.
And if you exercise to boost your HDL
you can extrapolate down a little further.
So what this shows us is that
even in 15 to 19-year olds,
atherosclerosis has begun
in a substantial number of individuals,
and this observation suggests
beginning primary prevention
at least by the late teenage years
to ameliorate every stage of atherosclerosis
and to prevent or retard progression to more advanced lesions.
You start kids out on a low saturated fat diet
and you may see a significant improvement
in their arterial function by 11 years old!
Exposure to high serum cholesterol even in childhood
may accelerate the development of atherosclerosis.
Consequently, the long-term prevention of atherosclerosis
might be most effective when initiated early in life,
as in 7-months of age.
Atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries,
begins in childhood.
Remember, by age 10,
nearly all kids have fatty streaks,
the first stage of the disease.
Then… the plaques start forming in our 20s…
and get worse in our 30s,
and then can start killing us off.
In our hearts it's a heart attack,
in our brains it's a stroke,
in our extremities it can mean gangrene,
and in our aorta an aneurysm.
If there is anyone watching this video
that is older than 10 years of age,
the choice likely isn't whether or not to eat healthy
to prevent heart disease,
it's whether or not you want reverse
the heart disease you ALREADY have.
Ornish and Esselstyn proved you can reverse
heart disease with a plant-based diet,
but we don't have to wait until our first heart attack
to reverse the clogging of our arteries.
We can start reversing our heart disease right now.
We can start reversing heart disease in our kids, tonight.