 It was this landmark study published in 1953 that radically changed our view about the development of heart disease forever. A series of 300 autopsies performed on U.S. battle casualties of the Korean War, average age, 22. 22 years old, but 77% of their hearts had gross evidence, meaning visible to the eye evidence of coronary atherosclerosis, hardening of their arteries. Some of them had vessels that were clogged off 90% or more. As an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded, this widely cited publication dramatically showed that atherosclerotic changes appear in the coronary arteries' years and decades before the age at which coronary heart disease becomes a clinically recognized problem before symptoms arise. Follow-up studies on the hearts of thousands more soldiers over the subsequent years confirmed their results. How young does it go? Fatty streaks. The first stage of atherosclerosis was found in the arteries of 100% of kids by age 10. What's accounting for this build-up of plaque even in childhood? In the 80s, we got our first clue. The now famous Bogalusa Heart Study, looking at autopsies of those dying between the ages 3 years old to age 26, and the number one risk factor was cholesterol. You could see the stepwise increase in the amount of their arteries covered in fatty streaks as the level of bad cholesterol in the blood increased. As powerful as this was, this was only looking at 30 kids. So they decided to study 3,000. 3,000 accidental death victims ages 15 to 34. After thousands of autopsies, they were able to produce a scoring system, able to predict advanced atherosclerotic lesions the coronary arteries of young people. The higher your score, the higher the likelihood you have these lesions growing in your heart. So if you're in your teens, 20s, early 30s, and you smoke, your risk goes up a point. If you have high blood pressure at such a young age, that's 4 points. If you're an obese male, 6 points. But high cholesterol was the worst. If you are non-HDL cholesterol, meaning your total cholesterol, minus your good cholesterol, is above like 220, that's like 8 times worse than smoking. So let's say you're a young woman with relatively high cholesterol, but you don't smoke, you're not overweight, your blood pressure and blood sugars are fine. At your sweet 16, there's just a few percent chance you already have an advanced atherosclerotic lesion in your heart, but if you don't improve your diet by your 30th birthday, there may be like a 1 in 5 chance. You have some serious heart disease. And if you have really high cholesterol, it could be closer to 1 in 3. Bringing your cholesterol down to even just that of a lacto-ovo-vegetarian, and you're down to here. And if you exercise to boost your HDL, you can extrapolate down a little further. So what this shows us is that even in 15 to 19 year olds, atherosclerosis has begun in a substantial number of individuals. And this observation suggests beginning primary prevention, at least by the late teenage years, to ameliorate every stage of atherosclerosis and to prevent a retard progression to more advanced lesions. You start kids out on a low saturated fat diet, and you may see a significant improvement in their arterial function by 11 years old. Exposure to high serum cholesterol, even in childhood, may accelerate the development of atherosclerosis. Consequently, the long-term prevention of atherosclerosis might be most effective when initiated early in life, as in seven months of age. Atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, begins in childhood. Remember, by age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks at the first stage of the disease. Then the plaques start forming in our 20s, and get worse in our 30s, and then can start killing us off. In our hearts, it's a heart attack. In our brains, it's a stroke. In our extremities, it can mean gangrene, in our aorta, an aneurysm. If there is anyone watching this video that is older than 10 years of age, the choice likely isn't whether or not to eat healthy to prevent heart disease, it's whether or not you want to reverse the heart disease you already have. If your condition has improved, you can reverse heart disease with a plant-based diet. But we don't have to wait until our first heart attack to reverse the clogging of our arteries. We can start reversing our heart disease right now. We can start reversing heart disease in our kids tonight.