Heart Disease.

This is coolbert:

Of this hypothesis and assertion I am somewhat skeptical. Other factors are at work.

"Could heart disease in the South be a lingering effect of the American Civil War?"

"A map of deaths from heart disease reveals the American South ablaze in red; of the 10 states with the highest rate of death from heart disease among white people in 2010, all but two are below the Mason-Dixon line."

". . . Could the heavy toll of heart disease in the American South today have been triggered, in part, by the region’s rapid rise out poverty since the 1950s?"

". . . that decades of poverty caused by the Civil War shaped people’s organs and physiology in a way that left them particularly unsuited for a cushy life. The current health disparities in the South . . . developed as Southerners encountered more prosperous lifestyle than their bodies were prepared for, including more food and less manual labor."

Comments:

* For a period of about one hundred years the American South relatively poor when compared to the rest of the United States. From the devastation of war. This is true.

* Those states of the Confederacy at the time of the American Civil War the fifth richest nation on the planet. Gone with the wind in the aftermath of the war.

* Whites in the American South comprising a more ethnically homogeneous population. Their susceptibility to heart disease possibly and more than likely genetically related.

* Whites in the American South commonly eat a dairy-based diet. NOT heart healthy.

* Pellegra a diet related disease common in the American South until fairly recently. That bland diet of bacon, corn pone, corn bread and molasses not conducive to good health.

Damn Yankees did it? I think not.

coolbert.