This is the village where people don’t get heart disease despite high-fat diets
Anogia is a beautiful village in northern Crete where people live long healthy lives. Their diet is rich in animal fat, which often leads to heart disease and premature death, but this is not the case.
Scientists have discovered that Cretan villagers have a genetic variant that protects them against the effects of „bad” cholesterol and fat, according to the Independent. They believe that this genetic make-up is unique to the population of Crete’s Mylopotamos area. Previous genome sequencing of thousands of Europeans found just one copy in an individual from Tuscany, Italy.
The Amish population in the United States also possess a separate variant in the same gene.
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This might open a door to treating cardiovascular disease in those who were not blessed with the unique gene. One of the researchers, Dr Eleftheria Zeggini, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, told The Independent that, despite seeming promising, „this is the start of a long journey”.
„This is not a licence to eat and drink as much as one likes because cardiovascular disease is a combination of environmental and genetic factors,” Zeggini said. “It’s less a matter of prevention and more of treatment.”
In the journal Nature Communications, the researchers explained how they had sequenced the entire genomes of 250 individuals. They also studied another 3,200 people whose genetic information was already known. In the end, they discovered that people had a gene variant that wasn’t known before that protected them against heart disease and related complications.
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