In particular, the animals were lean and their meat had a much more polyunsaturated fatty acid composition as compared with the saturated fat of the feedlot animals consumed by humans today. The rich 114 OCR for page 115 diversity of the food supply meant that diseases of poverty, including vitamin and mineral deficiencies, were undoubtedly much less common. The main point I wish to make here is that both present-day diseases of affluence and diseases of poverty have resulted from technological advances. Technology has provided problems and opportunities. The agricultural revolution meant that given the proper distribution, all peoples of the world, including those of the United States, can have an ideal diet that will help them to produce healthy children and healthy adults free from the diseases of civilization with which so many are now afflicted.
Technology means a safe, and tasteful, food supply.
Both the diseases of overconsumption and diseases of poverty can be ameliorated by modifying the nutritional life-styles of both the relatively affluent and the poor. Before I stress official public policy, important as it is, I want to emphasize the importance of the private, informal networks of dietary intervention. Take, for example, atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease. The private network that is of the opinion that dietary cholesterol and fat are bad for the heart began in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. They said it all.