Cholesterol - Eat Your Heart Out

This is the injured heartbeat of a 10-year-old man under intensive care, but even now he has about a 30% chance of dying from a second heart attack within 5 years. Ed Hartley never suspected his diet might have led to the corrupt of his heart and blood vessels. See, you know, I thought I was in pretty good shape for my years. Well, I'm going to have to take a good hard look at what I'm going to do in the future and how I'm going to do it. Will you change your diet? Well, I know that I know that's in the books now. Definitely. It'll be a change in diet. [Music] We North Americans are eating ourselves to death. And it starts long before age 59. This bus is carrying a group of carefree high school students. And they're about to take part in a dramatic experiment in blood chemistry. After 28 days, they'll know not to fool around with bad foods. It's 7:30 in the morning and we're on our way to a general hospital for blood tests. Hi, I'm Jack McGaw and I want to thank you very much for participating in this venture first of all and uh I just felt it might be useful to you to know why it is we're calling this the blood bus and why you're involved in this experiment. Can you tell me how many people are are on this bus? How many students are here this morning? 17 16 16 16 Well, you might be interested in knowing that out of the 16 people on this bus, about half of you will die from some form of heart or blood vessel disease. How about that? How's that for breakfast? Four of you will likely die from a coronary heart attack. Statistically speaking, that's what's going to happen. [Music] I feel like telling you something that I know is true. You're going to have to change your way. Half of you will die and never know the reason why. You better listen what I say. The answers in the food. It's what you eat, not what you do that keeps your heart going strong. The answers in the blood. So let it flow. Let it run. Don't fool around. Cholesterol one. On this first day of the experiment, we're taking blood to get a cholesterol reading for each of the 16 students. The average for the group turned out to be 158 mg per set, which is within the normal range for North American teenagers. Our medical team will monitor the level many times over the next four weeks. The following evening, we brought the students together with their parents to explain what was going to happen. One of our dieticians describes what cholesterol is. Predominantly um a form of fat that's found in food, body tissues, and blood. Okay? Again, it's naturally in our body and we can't do without it. Now what happens uh when you have these high levels of cholesterol in your arteries flowing through your blood, it has a tendency to lay down on the cell wall and cause the vessel or artery to close in so that blood cannot flow freely through the artery. Now here's our plan. We'll divide the students into two groups, put them on different diets, and see just how dramatically they can change their cholesterol levels. One group of students will try to decrease cholesterol. The other will try to increase cholesterol. This is the group that will try and reduce blood cholesterol by avoiding foods high in saturated fats and by eating foods that lower the amount of cholesterol in their blood. So that's the maximum. Is that added on to the meat? Like is that right? Um so this is so that means if we have a 6 steak for dinner, we've we've shot the biscuit. Right. Right. Now, most days you should try and divide all your serving sizes up evenly throughout the day, meaning that you shouldn't have a like all your meat at one time. So, these students will be eating lean meat, fish, or chicken. They'll be drinking skim milk and cutting out cream and ice cream. They'll substitute soft, polyunsaturated margarine for butter. And they'll be using specified vegetable oils for cooking and for salads because polyunsaturated vegetable oils tend to reduce cholesterol in the blood. Breads, cereals, potatoes, and vegetables are okay in limited amounts. In this experimental diet, eggs are eliminated because of the cholesterol in the yolk, and most fried foods and sweet foods will be avoided. This group of students will try to increase their cholesterol level with a typical North American diet containing an excess of animal fats, rich dairy products, and sweets. In fact, just about anything goes. Chocolate bars, potato chips, donuts, these sort of items so that we're encouraging you to have at least two snacks per day. We usually take our coffee black, but we're sugared. Should we start to try? Well, if if you can if you can if you can tolerate milk in your coffee or cream in your coffee, fine. But if you really find it disagreeable, then just drink a black but have the sugar. So if you want to land the future, nothing but the past. A little wisdom for us all. Set yourself free. Hey, be who you want to be. Don't fool around. Cholesterol. Hey, don't fool around. Cholesterol. Don't move around. Cholesterol. Two weeks later, and already the group on the low-fat diet is showing a striking cholesterol reduction. But the highfat anything goes dieters haven't increased their level at all. [Music] We can't send the students and teachers back to school hungry, so we're feeding them all [Music] breakfast. You can do it. You can do it. Eat your heart. You can do it. You can do it. Eat your heart. You can do it. You can do it. Eat your heart. You can do it. [Music] These high-fat breakfasters are having cream in their cereal, generous servings of scrambled eggs and butter on their toast. The low-fat group is drinking skim milk and using it on their cereal. And they're using soft margarine instead of butter, drinking coffee with no sugar or cream. [Music] These young men and women are learning what an easy chemical equation it is. Excessive amounts of animal fat, eggs, and sugarrich foods tend to increase the level of cholesterol in the blood and in the artery [Music] walls. You can do it. You can do it. Even our teachers are learning they're a walking test tube. Your blood sample comes in. We first have to uh separate it so that we can analyze the plasma. And your blood's made up of two major components. Your blood cells and your your plasma or serum. And all we're doing here is simply exerting a a centrifugal force which causes the blood cells to sink. Nothing really floats. You simply have your blood cells uh sinking out. [Music] This automative machinery separates the cholesterol and other fatty substances from the rest of the serum and sends it on to be measured. [Music] [Music] Fatty substances travel through the body in a fascinating manner. After fatladen foods reach the stomach, they're mixed with gastric juices and mulched by the stomach's action. Then they're pumped into the small intestine where digestive juices break down the fat. The fat is absorbed and eventually reaches the liver where it's processed and packaged for distribution throughout the body. Fat is efficiently stored in our fat tissue and is a major source of energy for our muscles. But when we eat too much, too many fat particles containing cholesterol appear in the blood and the cholesterol level rises. These fat particles infiltrate the artery wall and cause hardening and narrowing. And that damage can begin in the teenage years. This artery is from the body of a person who has just died from heart disease. And we can see the typical plaques and scars found with high cholesterol. The victim was only 38 years old. Now we'll discover how our students manipulated their blood chemistry. Our consultant, Dr. Alec Little. Did anybody have any problems uh sticking to the diet? How about when it was all over? What did you do then? They've earned that laughter because our experiment is dramatically successful. The students on the highfat diet weren't able to increase their cholesterol at all. Possibly because their regular eating habits included lots of the typical rich foods which are the curse of North America. But the students on the controlled fat diet were able to lower their cholesterol by a whopping 18% in just four weeks. Now, both groups know how to lower cholesterol by limiting fatty meats and eggs and substituting chicken and fish by limiting butter and whole milk and substituting soft margarine and skim milk. By avoiding sugar and sweets if you're not allowed to smoke or drink or do anything like that, how are you supposed to like, you know, lead a normal life? Well, we we live in a society which is free and you can do anything you like. uh you can smoke and you can drink and you can eat whatever you like. All the health profession can do is uh tell you what is good for you and what is bad for you. And as individuals, we can point out where you as an individual may be at greatest risk and what you should avoid. It's up to you to make the decision as to whether or not you want to do it or not. I feel like telling you something that I know is true. You're going to have to change your way. How about you will die and never know the reason why. You better listen what I say. The answers in the food. It's what you eat, not what you do that keeps your heart going strong. The answers in the blood. So let it flow. Let it run. I don't fool around. Cholesterol one. [Music]