X-Message-Number: 10823 Subject: heart disease Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 07:40:50 -0500 From: "Perry E. Metzger" <> > From: Jan Coetzee <> > Subject: cholesterol and exercise > > I spend most of my life avoiding fats and cholesterol. I also exercised > regularly. It did not help. My cardiologist told me every one over 45 is > at risk. All you can hope is that you have the correct genes. That is not true. The evidence is pretty strong that if you radically lower your fat intake (not just "avoid fats" -- lower your intake to below 10% of calories or even further) and exercise, you will at the very least put off heart disease by many years. In fact, for most people, a very low fat vegan diet and regular exercise will *reverse* atherosclerosis -- this is the only known way to do that without drugs or surgery. There are very rare people who produce so much cholesterol (due to gentic defect) that very little will help them, but that is a tiny percentage of the population. Almost everyone else can get substantial benefit. BTW, note that the "lower your fat intake" advice produces only modest benefits until you *really* lower your fat intake, which is very difficult to do on a meat eating diet. Going from 40% of calories from fat to 20% is certainly good if it is all you can manage, but getting down to 10% or less is even better. You can also do other things to help. Taking 400IU of Vitamin E per day will, on its own, lower your risk of heart disease substantially (I believe the number is something ridiculous like 40% but I could be off by a big percentage -- my memory is weak this morning). Not smoking is a giant help. Not being overweight is a giant help. These are all fairly trivial things to do. Even the diet changes in question are fairly trivial. I know lots of whiny people who say things to me like "but meat tastes so good" and stuff like that. Well, I can't say that I miss meat given that I actually seem to be eating far better flavor-wise on my current diet, but if you really want those burgers and fries, well, just realize that you're making a conscious decision to live a shorter lifetime. Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10823