A week or so ago, I posted a bit of epidemiology concerning saturated fat intake associated with heart-disease deaths by country. As you saw, it was all over the map. I did speculate, however, that if you were going to try to fit a curve, it would slope downward, meaning: more saturated fat, less heart disease deaths. Well, owing to my vast network of resources [grin], physicist Robert McLeod offered to fit a curve if I could get him the tabular data, which, thanks to Ricardo, I did. So, here's the graph (see here for the one with the country labels). Here's what Robert had to say. All statistics done in MATLAB. I found that if I define SF = % saturated fat intake CHD = # heart deaths per year per 100,000 men then CHD = (-4.734 +/- 2.003)*SF + (144.5 +/- 21.4) +/- errors are standard deviations (i.e. one sigma) with an R^2 = 0.13 (terrible) between the fit data and experimental data. The plot I provided shows the baseline along with a top and bottom curve which are the 95 % confidence interval lines (~1.96 sigmas). Although the statistics appear fairly poor, we can make one statement...