• Dedication to     Ancel Keys  • Introduction  • Overview  • Yugoslavia  • Italy  • Greece  • Finland  • Netherlands  • U.S.A.  • Japan  • Addendum

To Ancel Keys, pioneering investigator, health revolutionary, and (usually) forbearing colleague who "discovered" The Mediterranean Diet and Lifestyle and introduced the idea of mass causes andpreventability of heart attacks.

To colleagues in the great adventure of the Seven Countries Study, I am grateful for collegiality, friendship, and hospitality over the years, and for tolerance of my foibles, largely left undocumented in this collection. I beg forgiveness for invasion of privacy and other sins of omission and commission in these ramblings about our times together in the field.

I am most grateful, of course, to Ancel Keys, our hardy chef d'orchestre, who today, at age ninety-one, is still busily conducting research. He is the source and inspiration of the marvelous composition, the Seven Countries Study, and of creative opportunities and careers for many of us, his colleagues. He never actually released the baton during the grand performance, nor, in fact, did he ever formally anoint me "Concertmeister," but we got along tolerably well with my ambivalent role at second fiddle.

Alessandro Menotti and Daan Kromhout have kept the Seven Countries Study vital with new ideas over the years. Hironori Toshima and Yashinori Koga delightfully brought all the principal investigators together for the thirty-fifth anniversary conference in Japan in 1993.

I also acknowledge with pleasure the support of University of Minnesota Deans Gaylord Anderson and Lee Stauffer who let us do "our thing," in and away from Memorial Stadium, with only a rare rolling of their eyes.

I am particularly grateful to Nelly Trocmé Hewett, my wife during this study, who kept the home fires burning, and to our children John, Katia, and Heidi, who thrived despite my frequent absences on these fine adventures.

Finally, I am indebted to my editor, Katia Blackburn, for skilled, bold, and almost painless surgery, and to my assistant, Nola Fortner, for perfect drafts.