Search Results for “israeli paradox”

Source: Israeli paradox

The Israeli paradox is an apparently paradoxical epidemiological observation that Israeli Jews have a relatively high incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), despite having a diet relatively low in saturated fats, in apparent contradiction to the widely held belief that the high consumption of such fats is a risk factor for CHD. The paradox is that if the thesis linking saturated fats to CHD is valid, the Israelis ought to have a lower rate of CHD than comparable countries where the per capita consumption of such fats is higher.
The observation of Israel's paradoxically high rate of CHD is one of a number of paradoxical outcomes for which a literature now exists, regarding the thesis that a high consumption of saturated fats ought to lead to an increase in CHD incidence, and that a lower consumption ought to lead to the reverse outcome. The most famous of these paradoxes is known as the "French paradox": France enjoys a relatively low incidence of CHD despite a high per-capita consumption of saturated fat.
The Israeli paradox implies two important possibilities. The first is that the hypothesis linking saturated fats to CHD is not completely valid (or, at the extreme, is entirely invalid). The second possibility is that the link between saturated fats and CHD is valid, but that some additional factor in the typical Israeli diet, lifestyle or genes creates another CHD risk—presumably with the implication that if this factor can be identified, it can be isolated in the diet or lifestyle of other countries, thereby allowing both the Israelis, and others, to avoid that particular risk.