Professor Robert Byrne

And that causes heart attack.

If the plaque that's built up in your heart arteries suddenly ruptures, your body builds a clot on that ruptured plaque to try to heal the plaque.

That causes blood to stop and you have a heart attack.

Or a more gradual buildup of plaque can give rise to symptoms like angina, which is a pressure in the chest when you exert yourself.

or breathlessness.

And these are symptoms, obviously, that can kind of creep up in you slowly.

Isn't it?

Yeah, no, I think that's a fair analogy and it builds up over years and it starts quite early in life.

We know from studies of the soldiers who died in Vietnam, where a lot of them had autopsies, that even otherwise healthy soldiers had signs of early cholesterol plaques in their 20s.

And it's when it gets to a particular tipping point that it starts to cause symptoms, which is usually in middle age or in later life.

But it's certainly a process that in the Western world starts quite early.

And that's why there's more and more a move in cardiologists to assessing lifetime risk and to start very early in educating children in school about healthy lifestyle, dietary behaviours.

And some studies show if you do that, then they actually pass this information on to their parents and you can have important interventions.

Yeah, I mean, definitely diet and lifestyle interventions are the main intervention.

So taking exercise regularly will reduce your overall cardiovascular risk.

It mightn't affect your cholesterol panel per se.

The dietary changes have more impact on that.

And there's lots of different advice, lots of different diets have been tried.

But for heart health, it's a Mediterranean type of diet, which seems to help most, which is good news for many of us, because it's things that you enjoy in moderation.

Plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, white meat.