Cholesterol is a useful substance that our livers crank out by the bucketful. We need it in order to live. Anti lipid drugs have worked miracles in people with naturally high cholesterol, some well over 300. The jury is out on whether the benefit exceeds the risk in people with normal to high normal readings.

Imagine how vindicated I felt after learning that butter, essentially a stick of pure cholesterol, was less damaging to the system than the trans fats in "healthy" margarines. It seems that a lot of the dietary substitutes turn out to be worse for us in the long run than just eating a varied diet of real foods would have been, butter just being the tastiest of them all.

Most things we like we like because a.) we need them and b.) they are hard to come by in the natural world, like fats and sugars. What is required is moderation and variety, plus extra helpings of the stuff that is easy to find in nature, "eat your vegetables", not abstinence.

I find that I can get by with a lot less of it.

but I think my arteries and my heart are ok.

After the AR all the indications suggest that overall health declined for the population.

difference is that they had to chase theirs and we go to the grocery store to buy ours. They ate what they could find. This may tell us more about what was available to eat then than it does about the similarities in our health. I think we need to take a good look at the cultures of these societies and see what was occurring then.

Salt, alcohol, vinegar and other spices to make the food last, they had, sure. Were they sometimes forced to eat things that had gone bad or had no nutrtional value, I have no doubt. But not the cornucopia of synthetic additives that make for long shelf-life and things added that aren't really food and have never been seen before in history. Our modern processing and industrialization has gone beyond anything they could have eaten. We may get less parasites in our food than they did, but their food was digestable. It's said by some that if an insect won't eat something, or it never goes bad, it's not really food, you know?

what could have ancients have eaten that was so bad? meat I guess, has to be a weakness in the genes.

is that it isn't bad eating or "weakness," it's NORMAL. The body ages, stuff doesn't work as well as it used to.

Snotty life-style criticisms designed to keep oneself well-off and employed helping people whose problems are not really fixable.

its the presence of calcium in the arteries that suggests hardening during the person's lifetime, not how hard his arteries are at the time of autopsy.

But you know I was just being a smart-ass anyway.

Can't really jump to conclusions based on these premises.

Those of the rich, of course.
The rich could afford to eat lots of tasty meat and fatty foods.
And they paid for it in the end.

Egyptian mummies. It seems fairly probably because even today we find populations that have far fewer problems. Look at the Japanese vs the US.

poor?

And welcome to DU!

They were mummified purely because that was the environment they were "buried" in. The bodies did not rot but instead dessicated.

So this would have cut across the whatever socio-economic lines there were in the society.

At least I won't be alone when I'm dead and gone! to the mummies!!!

Do you really care to be around in such a bizarre state?

Welcome to the Democratic Underground btw!

afterlife aside.

I am agnostic on those issues.

Sorry.

noblewoman's remains.

I know it sucks to not be able to do what I used to do with vigor. Now its to the point that I'm dead tired just walking to the shop, long before I try to do something. I've got a couple projects that are in the incomplete stage that needs to be finished but I just can't seem to get the strength up to do it.
The doctor tells me it's all those vices I used to have that done me in, looks like he may not know what the hell he's talking about after all. Of course I suspected that anyway