HOW THIS GUY MANAGED TO CONVINCE THE WORLD THAT ANIMAL FATS ARE BAD, THE SAME WRONG INFORMATION WHICH LATER FOUND ITSELF IN MEDICAL NUTRITION CURRICULUM, THE SAME CURRICULUM YOUR NUTRITIONIST STUDIED.
In 1953, an American physiologist called Ancel Keys stood up at a World Health Organization (WHO) conference in Geneva and presented a graph.
The graph plotted fat consumption against heart disease mortality in six countries. The United States is at the top. Japan is at the bottom. A smooth upward curve in between. The room was convinced. The graph would go on to define global nutrition policy for the next seventy years.
There was one small problem with the graph. Ancel Keys had data from twenty-two countries. He chose six. Why?
The other sixteen, which included France and Switzerland, eating vast quantities of butter, tallow, and cheese with low heart disease, and countries like Chile, eating almost no animal fat and having high heart disease, did not produce the line he wanted. So they were not on the graph.
When this was pointed out, in print, at the time, Ancel Keys did not engage with the science. He launched a career. He became chair of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee. He got himself on the cover of Time magazine.
He organized the Seven Countries Study, a sequel to the cherry-picked six, selecting populations and time points that would confirm his hypothesis and excluding those that would not. Crete was measured during Lent. The comparisons were, by design, not fair.
Then he did the thing that turned him from a scientist into a politician.
He went after the opposition.
Dr. John Yudkin, a British physiologist, published a book in 1972 called " Pure, White and Deadly, How sugar is killing us and what we can do to stop it," arguing that sugar was a better fit for the heart disease data than fat.
His data covered more populations, more years, and more accurately matched the rise in cardiovascular mortality across the twentieth century.
Ancel Keys called him, in print, a charlatan. He used his position at the AHA to block Yudkin's research from being presented at conferences. He pressured editors. He lobbied funders. Yudkin's grants dried up.
His reputation was systematically dismantled by a man who, at this point, was not doing science but running a protection racket for a hypothesis. Yudkin died in 1995 in obscurity. His work has since been quietly vindicated. Nobody has apologized.
Meanwhile the American Heart Association, funded since 1948 by a $1.7 million donation from Procter and Gamble (makers of Crisco, a product that urgently needed a reason for Americans to stop cooking with lard), adopted Ancel Keys's recommendations and issued them as medical advice which got into medical nutrition curriculum the nutritionist have been studying and continue using as guidelines for patients.
The American public complied. Butter and tallow consumption collapsed. Margarine tripled. Seed oils, negligible in 1950, became the dominant cooking fat. The food industry reformulated thousands of products to remove fat and replace it with sugar, because the fat was the enemy and the sugar was not.
American obesity rates, stable for fifty years, began to climb in 1977, the year the McGovern committee translated Keys's hypothesis into federal guidelines. They have not stopped climbing since.
Type 2 diabetes followed. Metabolic syndrome followed. Fatty liver disease, which barely existed in 1950, became endemic. The entire constellation of chronic metabolic diseases now occupying every doctor's surgery in the developed world tracks almost perfectly onto the adoption curve of the guidance that Ancel Keys spent his career promoting.
He retired to Italy, drank olive oil, ate cheese, used tallow and animal fats, lived to 100, and described himself in interviews as a pioneer.
He was a pioneer. He pioneered the practice of producing a predetermined conclusion from selective data, destroying the reputations of anyone who noticed, and using institutional capture to convert the conclusion into policy.
Ancel Keys was not wrong the way scientists are sometimes wrong. Ancel Keys was wrong the way politicians are wrong. Deliberately. Profitably. Without consequence. You are still eating the consequences now.
So how can our health get back on track when the fraud is deep-rooted? Your nutritionist can't even fathom that this data exists because the food industry has buried it, and the only smoke allowed in medical curricula is what they want you to know.
Animal fats have gotten the blame for what sugar and vegetable oils are doing. If you want your health back, go against conventional recommendations, and you will see significant improvement.