Heart Disease In Mummies

Never doubt your mummy.  That's right, mummy, not mommy. Science has been looking at some of those well persevered mummies and they are telling us some eerie things about human health and diet. Heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, is often blamed on modern diets and a sedentary lifestyle. According to this thinking, if only people ate the "right" foods and exercised more, they could live longer. Governments have become politically correct directors of diet with food guidelines we are supposed to follow in order to remain healthy. You know the refrain, the "Put down that donut!"

Hmmmm maybe the warnings that poor diet and physical inactivity are associated with major causes of morbidity and mortality in the United States are not correct. I write that because examinations of the bodies of the Unangan mummies from Kagamil, in the Aleutian Islands, and other pre modern people indicate that, in fact,  heart disease is not at all new.  Those mummies, people who exercised more than we do as a matter of necessity and whose diet was free from modern temptations also suffered high levels of heart disease, according to the researchers. Yep! Mummies show heart disease and artery clogging at the same rate as we junk food eating modern people.

In recent years, X-ray-based scans of mummies from around the world and ones from ancient Egypt, Peru, Europe and the American Southwest  have found signs of heart disease, or arteriosclerosis, the plaque lining the arteries near the heart. This suggests that heart disease may be genetic or at least, only slightly influenced by diet. Bring on the d fried chicken and chocolate butter cake. For years, scientists have argued over the extent to which modern diets ought to be blamed for high rates of heart disease. An American Heart Association publication summarizes: "There can be little doubt that the Western diet is closely tied to the development of arteriosclerosis." Bah Humbug to that, at least according to the mummies.

For years the food police has been threatening us with early death while we munched on our burgers and fries. They bellow that  instead of our good tasting fatty diet, that a diet rich in protein and lower in carbohydrates is better. That "cave man" diet is supposed to keep us alive much longer. But the new research on the bodies of mummies might make us throw aside our salad more often. By turning up evidence of heart disease in populations with widely varying diets, the mummy research suggests that some unrecognized cause, perhaps genetics, besides what we choose to eat is what causes heart disease.

But what if the mummy research is flawed in some ways? It's not likely. Cardiologists who look at such scans in living humans, note that the appearance of the arteriosclerosis in the CT scans in the mummies is "virtually identical" to the appearance of arteriosclerosis in their patients. This similarity, they said, makes it unlikely that some change in the ancient bodies has created a false positive for coronary problems. Also, researchers of mummies form many different cultures and parts of the world find the evidence of ancient heart disease in mummies to be the same. So those results confirm that arteriosclerosis was present in ancient civilizations with wide cultural differences.

I wonder if my doctor should know about this. Maybe if I tell her she will stop telling me I am too fat and should eat broccoli instead of candy bars. The bottom line for me is that ancient people didn't have preservatives. Everything was organic, they didn't smoke and they got plenty of exercise. Yet the amount of arteriosclerosis in ancient times isn't much different from what you see in modern times. If you account for age, it looks like we're in the same ballpark.

Someone pass me a donut. I want my healthy diet, not salad.