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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #79: Heart disease and the standard American diet

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This week's "food for thought" excerpt comes from How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (2015), by Michael Greger, MD.

"Imagine if terrorists created a bioagent that spread mercilessly, claiming the lives of nearly four hundred thousand Americans every year. That is the equivalent of one person every eighty-three seconds, every hour, around the clock, year after year. The pandemic would be front-page news all day, every day. We’d marshal the army and march our finest medical minds into a room to figure out a cure for this bioterror plague. In short, we’d stop at nothing until the terrorists were stopped. Fortunately, we’re not actually losing hundreds of thousands of people each year to a preventable threat … are we? Actually, we are. This particular biological weapon may not be a germ released by terrorists, but it kills more Americans every few years than have all our past wars combined. It can be stopped not in a laboratory but right in our grocery stores, kitchens, and dining rooms. As far as weapons go, we don’t need vaccines or antibiotics. A simple fork will do. So what’s going on here? If this epidemic is present on such a massive scale, yet so preventable, why aren’t we doing more about it? The killer I’m talking about is coronary heart disease, and it’s affecting nearly everyone raised on the standard American diet."