Dietary-atherosclerosis study on deceased persons. Relation of eating pattern to raised coronary lesions.

Eating patterns of 456 New Orleans males, ages twenty to sixty years, indicate that clock-time and frequency of ingesting foods may help define life styles related to raised coronary lesions. Age, race, and occupation were also related to raised coronary lesions. The multiplicity of variables and strong interrelationships make evaluation difficult, but results from correlation studies, analyses of variance, and discriminant function analyses suggest that the number of meals plus heavy snacks, frequency of intake of caffeine and alcoholic beverages, and cigarette smoking rate for the last ten years of life may be valid factors in relation to development of atherosclerotic lesions. In other words, not only what we eat, as is now generally accepted, but how and when we eat it, merit consideration in studying the etiology of atherosclerosis.