What ancient mummies have to tell us about the perils of modern life
By Matt Crenson
Once you hit a certain age, visiting a doctor is basically a guilt trip. All that satisfying stuff you eat, drink or smoke is killing you, a white-coated overachiever tells you. You need to exercise and lose weight, or the grim reaper will be at your door long before you’re ready. And it will all be your fault.
There’s truth in that message. The primary causes of death in Western society today are cardiovascular disease and cancer, two diseases that are very much tied up with what we put in our bodies and how we use and abuse them. If you eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly and abstain from smoking and excessive drink, your odds of living to a ripe old age do in fact increase.
But how much? Are cancer and cardiovascular disease primarily caused by the excesses of life in a modern industrial society? Or are they the inevitable end of a long and otherwise healthy life? At some level, heart disease and cancer must kill so many of us simply because in the past, plagues and saber-toothed cats beat them to it.
CT scans of ancient mummies from Egypt, Peru, Alaska and the U.S. Southwest suggest that clogged arteries have always been a fact of life, even for people who defined fast food as a swift-running ungulate. Researchers recently examined 137 mummies for evidence of calcified plaques associated with major arteries, and found that 34 percent of them probably had some atherosclerosis when they died.