Medicine: Jews & Disease

Coronary artery disease, medical scientists have long suspected, is closely related to diet. So is diabetes. These suspicions have now been strengthened by close observation of one of the Orient's most ancient communities, preserved like a fly in amber for some 2,500 years. The observed are Jews who migrated from Yemen to Israel; the observers are European-trained immigrants to Israel.

By their own traditions, the Yemenite community is descended from Jews who fled Palestine when the First Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C. For the most part oppressed economically and socially and isolated in desert ghettos, the Yemenite Jews stubbornly cherished their traditional culture. With mixed marriages banned, they bred one of the purest surviving strains of Jewish stock.

In grinding poverty they worked hard physically, grew up lean and tough on a Spartan diet packed with starches—black bread (using 85% of the wheat grain), white and sweet potatoes, rice—as well as peppers, onions, tomatoes, peanuts, oranges, sesame seeds and abundant raw carrots. A minimum of food was cooked.

Yemenite Jews ate meat only about once a week. But they drank oceans of tea and coffee, and heady, 100-proof arrack distilled from citrus fruits and sugar-beet molasses.

Environment. After they escaped from Yemen to freedom, Israeli physicians began to make startling discoveries about them. In most ghetto communities, Jews have shown amazing resistance to tuberculosis, but among the Yemenite Jews there was soon a raging epidemic. This showed that resistance was no genetic or ethnic trait but a product of environment. Though they had lived in hovels, the Yemenite Jews had breathed dry air, relatively clean and germfree. With little exposure to TB, they had developed no resistance.

By 1953 another striking difference was evident. Recently arrived Yemenites who died of TB, or were killed in accidents amid the unfamiliar vehicular traffic, proved on post-mortem examination to have virtually no atherosclerotic heart disease. Yet this was the greatest killer among the Ashkenazim, Jews who had migrated to Israel from middle and northern Europe.

Dr. Daniel Brunner, Vienna-born and educated, began an intensive study in 1955 of second-and third-generation descendants of a handful of Yemenite Jews who had reached Palestine in a trickle from 1882 on. Genetically the same as the newcomers, these settlers had an incidence of coronary artery disease and heart attacks close to that of the Ashkenazim.

Why? Because they had adopted the Ashkenazic diet with plenty of meat and especially fats.

Diet. Last week Dr. Brunner had carried his findings over to diabetes. This disorder, he has found, occurs in 1.1% of the general population, in .55% of the early returning Yemenites, but in only 055% of the latecomers. And whereas diabetics in general have a high incidence of complications, notably atherosclerosis and changes in the eye (which may lead to blindness), Yemenite diabetics showed none of these. Main reason for their immunity on this score, said Dr. Brunner, is that diabetic Yemenites stay on their low-protein, lowfat, high-carbohydrate diet.