Scared Straight

A few months ago, Good Morning America did a segment on the effects of eating fatty foods does to your heart and blood. It was enough to scare you into eating healthy foods, until you forget about it and go back to clogging your arteries and making your heart work overtime.

Here is the gist of it:

A reporter went to researchers after fasting since the night beofre and they had ultrasound on their hearts and blood drawn, so that after they ate this incredibly high fat meal, these same tests were performed. If you think the effect of fat on your blook are invisible, you are oh so wrong! A tube of the fasting blood is placed next to a tube of the blood drawn after the meal so they could be compared. The results were ugly. In the two tubes of blood, the clear light yellow portion of the blood was on top and the red blood cells had settled to the bottom. The fasting tube looked like what you would expect, the clear plasma at the top was light yellow and clear, you could probably read text through it. But the blook taken after the fatty meal was cloudy and white, showing in a very stark and disconcerting way how much fat was right there in the blood. Yuck.

The reporter then had the ultrasound done again, and the pre and post meal results were compared. You could actually hear the sounds her heart was making, and they were very different, the heart had to work much harder to pump the blood around with all that fat in it. When the heart has to work this much harder, it causes premature aging of the heart.

You can see this entire segment, only three minutes long, here:
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8020700