86Thousand400: Dietary Disasters

Farming Fatness

- 1. The first great modern human dietary disaster - paradise ends with the invention of agriculture

- 2. The second great modern human dietary disaster: The United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs adopts the 1977 Dietary Goal for Americans (USDGA), brought in by Ancel Keys

- Four problems with Ancel

Keys "science" that continue to go unchallenged

- 1. He selected data from only six of the 22 countries for which he had information

- 2. Causation can be proved only by randomised controlled clinical trials (RCTs) in which all variables except the one of special interest are held constant. Keys only ever reported observational studies, he did not undertake a single RCT as truly great scientists must do. For the goal of science is always to disprove that which we hold to be most obviously true. Because he did not undertake RCTs, Keys could never prove the diet-heart hypothesis unequivocally

- 3. The growth in cigarette consumption after 1918. Keys was on a mission so he ignored any possible contribution that other factors could have made to the suddenly rising heart disease rates

- 4. Keys was not a clinician. He also had his critics. Professor John Yudkin, the Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of London argued that differences in heart disease rates could as well be explained by differences in annual income between countries. That is, growing levels of affluence was the real cause of the rising incidence of heart disease. There was also almost a perfect relationship between the amount of sugar eaten in different countries and their respective rates of heart disease

- Thus already in the 1970s the evidence implicating sugar as a dietary factor associated with coronary heart disease was at least as strong as that incriminating dietary saturated fat

- Today, those countries with the highest percentage saturated fat intakes like France and Switzerland have the lowest rates of heart disease whereas those with the lowest intakes of saturated fat have the highest rates

- The amount of fat in the diet is unrelated to heart disease risk. Reducing dietary fat intake over many years does not change heart attack risk

- Even for the healthy, replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated "vegetable" oils, as promoted by the 1977 USDGA, cannot be healthy because it increases the intake of unhealthy omega-6 and trans fats whilst reducing the intake of healthy omega 3 fats found in butter and other dairy produce from pasture raised animals

- All the evidence should by now have finally buried the diet-heart plumbing hypothesis from heart disease. That it has not is because the wealth of the pharmaceutical industry and the modern practice of medicine is crucially dependant on the continued survival of the plumbing theory since without it there is no market for cholesterol lowering statin drugs

- Data shows that saturated fat in the diet protects against heart disease

- The real tragedy is that the removal of fat from the human diet, as advocated by Keys and his disciples, is very likely the single direct cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemics that began after 1980. Which raises the question: why did these twin epidemics begin in 1980? And not before, or after?