Hi Drs,
In the podcast it was mentioned that heart disease rates have been decreasing steadily over time. I don’t have a particularly noteworthy source on hand, but general disease surveillance data seems to indicate heart disease rates in the US rose steadily over time (late 1800s onward), rising more sharply from about the 1920s to the 1950s and then beginning the gradual decline. Is there any leading theory on why rates rose steadily? It seems to inversely correlate with infectious disease, for instance, although there are a ridiculous amount of variables at play here. It’s difficult to get an easy idea of what the actual average lifespan was, since “life expectancy” tends to factor in infant and child mortality rates. Mostly curious if heart disease would have been far more prevalent then than now if infectious disease deaths were not so commonplace, but that my be nearly impossible to determine.
The reason I ask is because it’s interesting but dubious to look into history, as some do, and say that “such and such people did X and didn’t do X and therefore had less heart disease/cancer/etc”, but this is a rather commonplace practice.