HEART HEALTH & APOLIPOPROTEIN E

Course overview

Every decade has its diet craze -- ultra-low-fat diets in the 1980s, low-carb diets in the 1990s, and high-omega-3 diets in the new millennium. These are not necessarily profit-driven efforts to exploit people's desire to improve their health, but, rather, legitimate attempts to apply research on how macronutrients affect human metabolism, which is based on "hunter-gatherer" evolutionary adaptations. Efficiently storing energy in fat tissues, for example, was a survival mechanism for our distant forebears, but now is maladaptive. As we understand that, attempts to apply the knowledge are understandable -- and these fad diets work often enough to gain credibility.