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First, the silver lining: it turns out having heart disease isn't all your fault, and it's not entirely the fault of your imperfect genes; astonishing new research (published in the gold-standard Archives of Internal Medicine) now fingers a ubiquitous industrial chemical known as PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic Acid) as playing a roll in the modern epidemic of heart disease.
A simple water filter can reduce your exposure to a chemical linked to heart disease.
It's so easy to come in contact with PFOA (it's in the drinking water in much of the U.S.) that as the authors of the Invited Commentary in the Archives put it: "Perfluorooctanoic acid does not occur naturally but is present in the serum of most residents of industrialized countries." According to the research 98% of Americans have measurable levels of PFOA in their blood.
Researchers did not feed people PFOA to see what happens; they looked at blood levels of PFOA and disease patterns in more than 1,300 people.
What they found is that the higher a person's blood levels of PFOA the more likely they were to have cardiovascular disease.