We tend to think of junk food, obesity and high cholesterol as a problem of the modern age – but apparently the ancient priests of Egypt caused as much damage to their health as we do today/
According to Egyptologists and scientists writing in The Lancet the priest’s diet, rich in fatty foods, alcohol and red meat, meant that they suffered from heart disease and tended to die early.
In ancient Egypt, the priests were expected to placehuge plates of food before the statues of the gods three times a day, in order to appease them.The gods were offering massive quantities of roasted birds, cakes, bread and oceans of beer and wine – but then the food would be divied up between the priests for them to take home to their families. Much of the menu was extremely high in saturated fat.
The University of Manchester scientists combined translations of inscriptions on the temple walls with analysis of the priest’s mummified remains, to work out how bad their atheroscelerosis (or build up of fatty plaques in the arteries) was.
They showed that the priests were suffering from high cholesterol long before Macdonalds and fried chicken became such a problem. Of the 16 mummies they examined, 9 showed signs of atheroscelerosis. It is thought that for the peasants who made up the majority of the population, living off cereals and vegetables, high cholesterol was very far from being a problem.
Some unscrupulous priests could even be accused of deserving everything they got, after inscriptions indicated that they would take the food without even offering it to the gods.
Professor Tony Heagerty said that the findings showed that the modern plague of cholesterol is ‘nothing more than history revisiting us’, as unequivocally ‘atherosclerosis is a disease of ancient times.’