Tips from the Professor:
Another Mystery solved!
Men living in Japan have 1/2 the risk of heart disease
compared to men living in the United States despite
having adopted a mostly western lifestyle since World
War II.
If you look at risk factors, Japanese men and US men
have very similar serum levels of total cholesterol,
blood pressure and rates of type 2 diabetes.
And Japanese men now have a much higher rate of smoking
than US men.
It seems like they are doing everything wrong - but
they still have a much lower risk of heart disease!
Actually, they are not doing everything wrong. They do
eat a lot more fish than US men - and since those fish
come from the Northern Pacific they are loaded with
omega-3 fatty acids.
But it had never been clear whether it was the omega-3
fatty acids in their diet or differences in their
genetic make up that were protecting the Japanese men.
So Dr. Akira Sekikawa and colleagues at the University
of Pittsburgh School of Public Health undertook a study
to determine the cause of the remarkably lower
incidence of heart disease among Japanese men (The
study was published in the August 5, 2008 issue of
Journal of the American College of Cardiology).
The study enrolled 868 randomly selected men aged 40 to
49. Of these, 281 were Japanese men from Kusatsu,
Shiga, Japan; 306 were white men from Allegheny County,
Pennsylvania; and 281 were third- or fourth-generation
Japanese-American men from Honolulu, Hawaii.
As previous studies had shown, all three groups of men
had similar blood cholesterol and blood pressure
readings and similar rates of diabetes.
