I was having an email exchange with my aunt the other day who was lamenting how her husband's doctor told him that his total cholesterol of 117 (!) is one that most people would "die for." Maybe he's right, as we'll see in a minute; but first, I should point out that George is in his late 80's. So, always be careful about assigning causes to correlations. Correlations are great things, but the best way to regard them is as falsification (disproof) of hypothesized causation. Reader and commenter on this blog, Ricardo, and blogger in his own right at Canibais e Reis has done something truly amazing (and has surely put Ancel Keys in short pants). Lots of this is going to go over the heads of most people, including myself, but I'm quite confident a number of math and health whizzes will be on this project in short order. Ricardo has essentially combined data from the following sources into a single database anyone can access: UN Food and Agriculture Organization Statistical Yearbook FAOSTAT food consumption database British Heart Foundation Health Statistics database World Health Organization Global Health Atlas In the end, he had data on 170 countries, which he...