In 2004, I was in Italy with my wife for a few days when I noticed I had trouble climbing hills and felt twinges in my shoulder. Knowing what this meant, and knowing that my mom had high cholesterol that killed her. I sought out a cardiologost when I got back to Germany a few days later. He did an EKG and said there was something there, and asked me to come back in two days for a stress-echo test. I did, and when he saw the result, he said to get up to the Krupp Klinik in Essen (half hour drive from where I was) immediately, drop everything, cancel everything, just get there ASAP, and he'd call ahead.
Scared shitless, I did what he said. The next morning, the head professor came in, looked at my chart, and said clear everything, this guy comes on at noon. They took me down, hooked me up to some Star Wars kind of machinery, went in through my leg, the whole nine yards. He put in two stents, let out a sigh of relief when he was done, and then showed me the "before and after" images. I had 2 coronary arteries 99% blocked, and was about to drop dead from a heart attack. It never happened because I had gotten there, in his words (the only thing he said to me in English), "just in time." They then called in my wife and told me all the stuff I was never to eat again.
Do go easy. I lucked out (this was 9 years ago), but just barely. A friend of mine who is a doctor told me that when performing autopsies on young people killed in car crashes, he saw the beginnings of clogged arteries already due to junk food. It's never too early to lighten up on that stuff, even if you're 20.
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