Dietary fat and coronary heart disease.

All the evidence relating dietary fat to plasma lipids or to coronary heart disease has been generated during the past 35 years. Not only are these topics not present in any issues of the British Heart Journal or -Proceedings of the British Cardiac Society before 1953, but also there was scant reference to them elsewhere. Earlier, the British Heart Journal published several papers on arteriosclerosis and coronary arterial obstruction and their relation to myocardial ischaemia and infarction but these included very little consideration of the patho- genesis of coronary heart disease and no mention of blood lipids or dietary constituents-fats or others.'l These papers associated the origin of coronary heart disease with hypertension and cigarette smoking and occasionally with heredity, but not with the other risk factor, blood cholesterol (or diet).