Israeli paradox

The Israeli paradox is an apparently paradoxical epidemiological observation that Israeli Jews have a relatively high incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), despite having a diet relatively low in saturated fats, in apparent contradiction to the widely held belief that the high consumption of such fats is a risk factor for CHD.

The observation of Israel's paradoxically high rate of CHD is one of a number of paradoxical outcomes for which a literature now exists, regarding the thesis that a high consumption of saturated fats ought to lead to an increase in CHD incidence, and that a lower consumption ought to lead to the reverse outcome.

The first is that the hypothesis linking saturated fats to CHD is not completely valid (or, at the extreme, is entirely invalid).

The second possibility is that the link between saturated fats and CHD is valid, but that some additional factor in the typical Israeli diet, lifestyle or genes creates another CHD risk—presumably with the implication that if this factor can be identified, it can be isolated in the diet or lifestyle of other countries, thereby allowing both the Israelis, and others, to avoid that particular risk.

[4] In 1993, a 23-year follow-up study to the Israeli Ischemic Heart Disease Study of ten thousand public service employees (widely referred to as the “Israeli Civil Service Study”[5]) found that there were only “weak associations of long-term coronary mortality with the dietary intake patterns of fatty acids.”[6] The term "Israeli Paradox" was first used by researchers Daniel Yam, Abraham Eliraz and Elliot Berry in a 1996 article in the Israel Journal of Medical Sciences.