Terrifying Mummies Should Watch Their Diet To Avoid Heart Disease Risks
Scary mummies in museums are not so different than you, experts say, because even the most hideous dried-up corpse from thousands of years ago suffers the same mundane risks for heart disease as people still shuffling along today: hardened arteries.
Bored researchers did a "stress test" on 137 mummies from around the world and found a third of the monstrosities were suffering from atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.
The heart condition is commonly believed to be associated with modern lifestyle errors such as smoking cigarettes and eating so much bacon and thinking that's funny, but this new research suggests mummies have been suffering these heart problems since the good old days when this was considered an honorable way to conclude your life.
The research brings into question the common modern belief held by many successful young people that they could somehow avoid the clenches of death if they "could emulate pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural lifestyles," the BBC reports. But that is unlikely.
As mummies were usually members of the elite 1%, it is possible that they engaged in poor health choices beyond the means of most of the population.
Photo by Gary Lynn Moseley via Shutterstock.
I love the assumption that atherosclerosis is somehow unnatural, a product of bad choices or something.
We get fatty deposits in our arteries because there's no good evolutionary reason not to get fatty deposits in our arteries. In the environment of evolutionary adaptation, the majority of men were lion food past their 40s—we may as well put some extra butter into the murderous bastards. That means there's no change in relative fitness if a man avoids getting heart disease in his 60s. Women may have lived longer (and I believe there's some evidence that having Grams around improves child survival), but (and, rather) they also don't get heart disease at nearly the same rate.