Diet and the Epidemiology of Coronary Heart Disease

Researches ranging from laboratory experiments to epidemiology on a world-wide basis have led to the hypothesis that the fat content of the habitual diets of populations has an important effect on the frequency of coronary heart disease in those populations. The general nature and some of the evidence for this hypothesis have been summarized several times in recent years,1but progress in this field manages to outdate each new résumé by the time it reaches print. Not that the previously cited facts or the hypothesis itself have been found to be erroneous; on the contrary, each new research adds detail, reduces areas of uncertainty, and, so far, provides further reason to believe that along the line of this hypothesis we may hope to find effective measures to reduce the incidence of coronary heart disease. As it now stands, the hypothesis may be stated simply as follows: Though many factors