Replies to post #84117 on LEE KRAMER'S ROOM: With Views

[blackhawks]

I lived in a high rise with a balcony in the 70's. Country back ribs on the Weber once a week, at least. They're addictive.

Thick cut Porterhouse and NY cut steaks, a lot.

I used to scoff at petite Filet cuts. I wanted something approximating the size of my heart. Ironic, I think now.

Could get away with in my late 20's. No more.

I learned about this in the early Internet days, late 90's for me.

I found it, stunning. But, you've got an ever narrowing window, pun intended, to enjoy them ribs. LOL!

Heart Disease Begins During Childhood

In 1953, a landmark study was published on cardiovascular disease among US soldiers killed in combat during the Korean War.[1] A team of military pathologists tasked with performing autopsies on deceased soldiers had, after careful dissection of the coronary arteries from some 300 bodies, discovered something that came as quite a shock to the medical establishment: heart disease developing in the young and healthy.



https://themouthful.org/blog-heart-disease-begins-during-childhood#:~:text=In%201971%2C%20a%20post%2Dmortem,classified%20as%20having%20severe%20atherosclerosis.

Gross atherosclerosis, the disease process that eventually leads to heart attack and stroke, was found in over three-quarters of the soldiers’ coronary arteries (the blood vessels that supply the heart itself). The extent of narrowing and hardening within the arteries varied among the cases- ranging from mild fatty streaking to marked narrowing from fibrous plaques (even complete occlusion in some cases).

Given that these men were only 22 years old on average, these findings ran contrary to what most medical professionals believed at the time, namely that heart disease was a largely unavoidable condition primarily affecting the elderly.[2] These findings??? called for a shift in focus tow???ard more preventative measures; whether or not this shift has truly been successful in the intervening seven decades remains??? up for debate.

Subsequent Soldier Autopsies- Vietnam, Iraq & Afghanistan

In 1971, a post-mortem analysis of hearts from 105 US combat casualties in the Vietnam War revealed that 45% of those young and ‘healthy’ soldiers had some degree of atherosclerosis within their coronary arteries, while 5% were classified as having severe atherosclerosis.[8] This finding was considerably lower than the rates found in casualties from the Korean War (77%).

In 2012, a similar study among 3,832 US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011, found coronary atherosclerosis in only 8.5% of post-mortems.[9]

While it is likely that significant improvements in heart disease prevention efforts (especially with regard to cigarette smoking among soldiers, which at one stage had been promoted by the military) explains the decrease in prevalence and severity of atherosclerosis across the three autopsy studies[10], it is difficult to directly compare them.

One important issue is the possibility of a ‘healthy warrior bias’, whereby soldiers who self-enlist are likely to be healthier on average than those drafted from the general population (as was the case for Korea and Vietnam).

This raises another important question: it seems that soldiers are significantly better off than they were 50 years ago, but what about the population as a whole?




Have We Succeeded?

At the beginning of the 20th Century, life expectancy in the US was only 47 years of age. Infectious diseases, namely pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhoea, were the leading causes of death;??? people simply did not live long enough to die from heart disease. Following the discovery of antibiotics, however, heart disease deaths rose dramatically over the next half century: in 1945, heart disease caused more deaths in the US than the next three leading causes of mortality combined.[10]

Early autopsy studies, alongside key publications that identified risk factors for developing heart disease, including the Framingham Heart Study, helped to explain the growing epidemic and called for a focus on preventative measures, especially among children and adolescents.[10] Health policies implemented in response, which were principally aimed at reducing smoking rates and blood cholesterol levels, have been remarkably successful: US heart disease mortality rates peaked in 1968 (and in NZ at around the same time) and have been declining ever since.[11] Advances in clinical treatment of established heart disease (‘secondary prevention’) are said to be responsible for around half of this decrease in mortality rate.[10].



That being said, heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death worldwide; in NZ, one third of all deaths annually are attributable to cardiovascular disease.[12] There is still much work to be done: rates of obesity and diabetes, two significant risk factors for heart disease, continue to rise both in NZ and around the world- signalling that the great need for prevention efforts beginning in childhood remai???ns to this day.

The Takeaway

Atherosclerosis and heart disease are not inevitable, natural consequences of growing older. Rather, our risk is modifiable; what we ???choose to put into our bodies every day, and what we choose to feed our kids, appears to be the single most important modifiable risk factor.[13] There is a great deal of overlap between the modifiable risk factors for heart disease among adults- namely, high blood cholesterol, high BMI, high blood pressure and cigarette smoking, and those for atherosclerosis in children.[6]

There is also a strong relationship between the age at which fatty streaks progress to fatty plaques in both the aorta and coronary arteries, a critical stage in atherosclerosis according to Strong et al., and these modifiable risk factors.[14] Furthermore, differences in the extent of atherosclerosis between gender and ethnic subgroups are established at a young age and parallel subgroup differences in the incidence of heart disease and stroke later in life.[3]

Irrespective of our age, we should all be mindful of the fact that heart disease is not something with a sudden onset that strikes randomly. The disease develops slowly over the entire lifespan as a result of lifestyle choices. Although we are significantly better off as a population than we were half a century ago, current statistics suggest that most of us will eventually die from heart disease.

[janice shell]

Yes, I think you might get tired of salmon pretty quickly.

I just about never have ribs. Well, really never. But when I have had them, I found the baby back ribs lacking. In meat.