A large body of evidence shows there were once enormous swaths of the world where the epidemic of coronary heart disease simply didn’t exist. For instance, in the famous China-Cornell-Oxford Project (known as the China Study), researchers investigated the eating habits and incidence of chronic disease among hundreds of thousands of rural Chinese. In Guizhou province, for example, a region comprising half a million people, over the course of three years, not a single death could be attributed to coronary artery disease among men under sixty-five.
