In a follow-up comment to her Grain Mainfesto, Melissa Urban at Whole9 criticized someone named Ancel Keys as being, “a terrorist who scared us all into the same low-fat, high-carb diet that made us SICKER than we’ve ever been, ever.”  From what I’ve read, Melissa really knows her stuff, so this sparked my curiosity as to how the whole low-fat craze came to be and the role this individual had in it.

After World War II, Keys was intrigued by the observation that heart attacks in starving post-war Europe had decreased dramatically.  He then directed his research to diet and its effects on heart disease.  Over the period of several decades Keys and his colleagues conducted what is known as the Seven Countries Study, published in 1980, where he monitored more than 12,000 men between the ages of 40 and 59 from 16 communities in Italy, the Greek islands, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Finland, Japan and the United States. The communities were reportedly chosen for their contrasting dietary patterns and the relative uniformity of their rural laboring populations.  Keys discovered that in those societies where fat was a major component of every meal, such as America and most notably Finland, blood-stream cholesterol was highest and the heart-attack death rate was greatest. In cultures where a diet of fresh fruit and vegetables, bread and pasta and plenty of olive oil, blood cholesterol was low and heart attacks were rare.  For the first time a connection between diet and coronary disease had been established. Keys’s findings were popularized by the publication of Eat Well, Stay Well (1959), The Benevolent Bean (1967) and Eat Well, Stay Well the Mediterranean Way (1975). He was also featured on the cover of TIME magazine in 1961 (pictured above) and his crusade against saturated fats and cholesterol earned him the nickname Mr. Cholesterol. 

In the 1960s Keys convinced a sizable part of the US public that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat would reduce blood cholesterol and the incidence of coronary heart disease. The resulting changes in the composition of food fats led to a doubling of the proportion of the unsaturated fatty acid intake.  This was followed by a decreasing trend in coronary heart disease beginning in 1968 which can be attributed to dietary changes.  [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys#Professional]  However, Keys has been criticized for falsifying his conclusions and being selective with his data.  One main counter to Keys’s research is that he had chosen to study only those countries where both saturated fats consumption and heart disease were high and ignored other countries that ate similar diet but had low rates of heart disease. 

“The dietary assessment methodology was highly inconsistent across cohorts and thoroughly suspect. In addition, careful examination of the death rates and associations between diet and death rates reveal a massive set of inconsistencies and contradictions. . .

It is almost inconceivable that the Seven Countries study was performed with such scientific abandon. It is also dumbfounding how the NHLBI/AHA alliance ignored such sloppiness in their many “rave reviews” of the study. . .

In summary, the diet-CHD relationship reported for the Seven Countries study cannot be taken seriously by the objective and critical scientist.”

– Diet, Blood Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease:
A Critical Review of the Literature, Volume 2, November 1991
[http://www.stop-trans-fat.com/ancel-keys.html]

Other prominent researchers have been unsuccessful in their attempts to derive the same correlations as Keys using the exact same data.  This has added support to claims that Keys filtered his data to support findings he desired.  Also, Keys had concluded that saturated fats, like those found in milk and meat, have adverse effects opposite to the beneficial effects of the unsaturated fats found in vegetable oils. These same unsaturated fats and oils are, however, found in meats and to a larger extent than Dr. Keys ever gave these foods credit for in any of his work.  Research has since cleared saturated fats of their bad rap and has shown that the cause of heart disease is not animal fats and cholesterol but rather a number of factors inherent in modern diets, including excess consumption of vegetables oils and hydrogenated fats; excess consumption of refined carbohydrates in the form of sugar and white flour; mineral deficiencies, particularly low levels of protective magnesium and iodine; deficiencies of vitamins, particularly of vitamin C, needed for the integrity of the blood vessel walls, and of antioxidants like selenium and vitamin E, which protect us from free radicals; and, finally, the disappearance of antimicrobial fats from the food supply, namely, animal fats and tropical oils [http://www.life-enthusiast.com/index/Articles/Enig/Truth_About_Saturated_Fat].  Keys’s emphasis on cardiovascular disease helped bring it to the forefront of public interest and the incidence of heart disease has dropped dramatically since the 1960’s.  However, obesity and the subsequent type-2 diabetes are at all time highs, problems for which the diets developed by Keys offer no solution.  This post is not to debate whether or not Keys is at fault for the obesityepidemic in the United States.  Rather I hope you see that the low-fat, high-carb diet that the USDA and others prescribe is based on 30+ years of faulty information that science is now painstakingly trying to resolve.

Despite his misunderstanding of the links between diet and heart disease, Keys was an advocate for a “reasonable diet” and “safe, useful exercise” which helped him reach the ripe age of 100 years old, passing away in 2004.  I wouldn’t be so extreme as to accuse Keys of being a terrorist who made of all sicker based on his dietary recommendations, like Urban says, but Keys’s inaccurate research has contributed to the misguided nutritional mentality of the general population.  Free your mind from the misled masses, don’t be a lipophobe, and your body will thank you.

WOD 03.10.10

Power Clean 5×3

AMRAP 10
7 Deadlift
7 HPC
7 Front Squat
7 Chest to Overhead

*2010 Queensland, Australia Sectionals WOD