With its shop-lined main street, baseball field and grassy square, Wellsburg, W. Va., is in many ways a typical American town. Perhaps too typical. A survey last spring found that almost 70% of the Wellsburg area's 11,000 residents were at risk for heart disease. "I was just shocked that my cholesterol was that high," says Kitty Weidner, 75, whose reading was 241 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl) of blood. Admits store owner Tom Zurbuch, 46, a former junk- food junkie whose cholesterol level was about 265: "Apparently, we haven't been eating right."
But Wellsburg had a change of heart last May, when...