The ways of heart disease research can sometimes be too tricky to follow for the unscientific mind, but when one hears that 809 members of the Old Order Amish community have been invited to drink milkshakes at a clinic in Lancaster, Pa. then one starts to raise one’s eyebrows. And yet this is a viable and potentially very useful scientific experiment.

As a matter of fact, it’s part of a study led by Dr. Alan Shuldiner from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore where he is head of the endocrinology, diabetes and nutrition division. He is also the senior author of the article published by Science, where the results of the study are reported. 

The researchers’ purpose was to measure the effects that the rich fat of those heavy milkshakes had on the bloodstreams of the Amish test subjects who were asked to participate precisely because of their long isolation and the fact that the members of the community shared many genes.

The results of the experiment were a bit of a surprise. About 5% of the participants’ triglycerides (a common form of fat in one’s blood) was not at all impressed by the massive intake of milkshake creaminess. It seems that these people have in fact a mutation disabling one of their two copies of apoC-III, which is, by all intents and purposes, a gene. This genetic fella codes for APOC3, a protein responsible for slowing the breakdown of triglycerides.

So, thanks to this mutation, these several lucky patients manage to break down that evil triglycerides pretty fast. But the researchers also found out that they don’t have as much LDL cholesterol, their arteries are clogged by less plaque and, overall,
the risk of heart disease is quite small.

To make a long scientific story short, according to the New York Times, this study proves that triglycerides is linked to heart disease, and that could lead to solid, clinical applications, even if not in the very near future.