THE FRAMINGHAM STUDY

​After the Second World War, the National Heart Institute in the USA was formed with a small budget and the difficult task of finding out how plaques formed and how they led to heart disease.  The Institute therefore decided to follow a group of people over several years and keep detailed medical records so that they could see who developed heart disease and who did not.


In 1948, they chose a small town in Massachusetts called Framingham, where over 5000 residents, male and female agreed to participate in the study. The results were used to develop the concept of risk factors such as high cholesterol, cigarette smoking, blood pressure, activity levels and obesity which were mentioned in last weeks’ article.


At the time this study started, most doctors believed that heart disease was an inevitable result of aging, much like your car parts wearing out at 100 000 miles. Finding out that the disease could be anticipated well in advance by looking at risk factors suddenly created the idea that prevention was a very valid concept and researchers started saying that preventive programs were necessary.


Over a thousand scientific papers have been published from the Framingham study, and it is ongoing, with four generations now having been studied. Although it is the best known study of heart disease there is an enormous body of research that looks at the causes of heart disease in both American and other more traditional societies.


In the China Study, it was shown that heart disease was rare in rural China, with American men dying from heart disease at a rate of nearly 17 times higher than their Chinese counterparts. So the question was asked, back in the 1960s and 1970s - why are Americans falling prey to heart disease when most of the undeveloped world was barely affected.


The answer was simple - heart disease is a disease of affluence, and people were dying from the food they were eating. The populations with the lowest rates of heart disease eat far less saturated fat and animal protein and far more whole grains, fruits and vegetables than consumed in the Standard American Diet.


Debates immediately sprung up. Some suggested that maybe it was genetics that made the difference since Chinese and Japanese people were obviously genetically different to the average Caucasian North Americans.  One of the ways this was disproven, was by looking at Japanese immigrants to Hawaii and California. Even within the same family, brothers living in the US had higher cholesterol levels and incidence of heart disease than brothers that had remained in their native Japan. Even smoking was not implicated as Japanese smokers in Japan, still had less coronary artery disease than Japanese Americans.


The early research results were showing a consistent picture. The more saturated fat and cholesterol (which indicate animal food consumption) that people eat, the higher their risk for developing heart disease. Unfortunately, as other cultures have adopted a Western diet, their rates of heart disease have skyrocketed.a