Pre Draft Intro to 60 Minutes seg (hour) Vascepa.
Intro: A silent war is raging in the USA. Silent but deadly. A war which kills more Americans every forty days then the War in Vietnam did in almost ten years.
The enemy in this war is atherosclerosis a disease in the large arteries which carry the blood supply to all the body tissues including the heart and the brain. Death from heart attacks and strokes have fallen over the last 30 years, due largely to public campaigns which have encouraged americans to exercise more, stop smoking and watch their diets. Still death from strokes and heart attacks cause more the one death out of every four and are the leading causes of death in both men and women.
Heart attacks result from blockage of the coronary arteries which supply the muscle of the heart. Blockage shuts off the oxygen supply to the heart muscle and prevents the heart from pumping blood to the rest of the body. The history of heart attacks in the USA is very sparse prior to the early 1950s. Which is interesting, because a higher percentage of the population smoked at that time then does now. We will re examine that fact later,
In first half of the fifties a series of medical articles came suggesting that dietary fat might be contributing to the coronary blockage the idea being the fat accumulated in the artery kind of like sludge in a drain pipe. An attempt followed study the fat intake in many other counties to find out whether total fat consumption could predict cardiac risk. The study showed there was a correlation in some countries, no correlation in others and a reverse correlation in France and Finland.
So this raised the possibility that there might be a specific fat, or fats which caused the arterial blockages..That and findings from autopsies done on Korean War casualties showed cholesterol streaks in the aorta, put cholesterol front and center as the target of investigation.
to be continued...":>) JL
