Diet and coronary heart disease: A survey of female mortality rates and food consumption statistics of 21 countries

Abstract

A previous survey by the writer, searching for correlations between male CHD mortality rates and the consumption of suspected dietary atherogens, pointed to unfermented milk proteins as the possibly most important atherogenic influence. Other long suspected dietary items, like sugar and saturated fats, appeared to play a less important, even if not negligible part. The present paper examines the correlation between female mortality rates and suspected causative agents by the comparison of CHD mortality rates and food consumption in 21 countries. Female CHD mortality rates are well known to be significantly lower than male mortality rates, but the difference between them varies considerably in various countries. Notably the difference tends to be larger under cold than under warm climatic conditions, calling attention to the relevance of climate. Consequently geographic latitude was taken into account as an additional independent variable. Multivariate analysis bore out the assumption that milk proteins represented the dominant atherogenic influence, with sugar, saturated fats and geographic latitude as significant contributors. The combined correlation coefficient of female CHD mortality rates and the before named 4 independent variates was 0.93.