Cornelis de Langen

He spent a substantial part of his career in Java, Indonesia where he did extensive work on tropical medicine and observed an association between dietary cholesterol intake and incidence of gallstones, arteriosclerosis and other "Western diseases".

[5] In 1914 he was Chef de Clinique in Internal Medicine at Groningen University, when the Netherlands government assigned him to help combat epidemic plague in Indonesia (then known as the Dutch East Indies).

[9] In 1938, when Van Den Bergh retired, de Langen became Professor of Internal Medicine and Chairman of the Medical Faculty at Utrecht.

The local diet is mainly vegetarian with rice as the staple, that is very poor in cholesterol and other lipids.” (quoted in [2])In his report to the second Conference of the International Society of Geographic Pathology in 1934 he noted that only 1 case of angina pectoris had been observed among Javanese patients admitted to the 500 bed Municipal Hospital in Batavia in five years.

Whenever, in hospitals or elsewhere, we give people a diet rich in lipoids, the quantity of cholesterin in their blood rises at once.” (quoted in [2]).

[13] De Langen published his results only in Dutch, so his work remained largely unknown to most of the international scientific community at the time.