How does this explain the higher rates of heart disease in the southeastern United States?
Must be all that sweet tea.
I blame the damn Yankees.
Probably a higher consumption of sugar and other high carbohydrate foods.
Hmmmm?
Bacon is only available in the SE US?
Wow!
“Lincoln’s Fault” brigade arriving in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
Maybe dredging everything with flour and deep frying it in Crisco has something to do with it. Add mashed potatoes with flour thickened gravy. Top it off with liberal helpings of biscuits, corn bread, or hush puppies. (Not to mention pecan pie and ice cream.)
We’d rather eat well and die of a heart attack at 70, than eat tofu and seaweed and die of Alzheimers at 95.
Heart disease has a large genetic component. Break it out by ancestry rather than region, which is after all rather meaningless in a widely varied population such as the United States. Then, I’d imagine a different picture would emerge. Some groups are just predisposed to certain diseases due to ancestry. Find the group that is overrepresented in the southeastern United States in comparison to the rest of the country, and you’ll find the group genetically predisposed to heart disease. I grew up with an extended family that fried just about every meat and put gravy on anything that wasn’t green or red. Not a fat person among them. No heart attacks, either. Fairly long-lived.
Just an anecdotal guess, there are more blacks who seem to die of heart disease at almost twice the rate of whites.
Just a little research bolsters my assertion.
Below are the percentages of all deaths caused by heart disease in 2008, listed by ethnicity.4
CDC
Race of Ethnic Group
% of Deaths
African Americans
24.5
American Indians or Alaska Natives
18.0
Asians or Pacific Islanders
23.2
Hispanics
20.8
Whites
25.1
All
25.0
White alone, 77.9%
Black or African American alone, 13.1%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone, 1.2%
Asian alone, 5.1%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, 0.2%
Two or More Races, 2.4%
Hispanic or Latino, ) 16.9%
White alone, not Hispanic or Latino, 63.0%
“How does this explain the higher rates of heart disease in the southeastern United States?”
First off would be genetics. I had ancestors from England settling in South and N Carolina a few hundred years ago. Some of the originals lived to be in their nineties and a couple made it to their 100’s. They and their children were hunters, fishers and farmers. Small farms where their personal food was raised and the extras traded for meats.
The average life span down to and including the generation before me was mid 80’s to mid 90’s.
No one was overweight nor skinny. Most raised their own vegetables, chickens, strawberries and other fruit and traded skills for local beef and hogs.
They weren’t big into rice, beans, ground corn products and store bought bread. They baked pies and cobblers mainly, and lard was used to make the crusts. Bacon fat was kept on the top of the stove in a coffee can, and it was used for everything. Sugar was never on the table. Local honey was there and was the sweetener. Homemade fruit preserves were on the kitchen table for breakfast and dinner. Cakes were reserved for special occasions. Coffee and sun tea were unsweetened.
It would probably be a safe bet that many of the higher rates of heart disease were genetic or from families living on high carb diets versus high amounts of protein from the daily diets or both.