Robert DuBroff, a cardiologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, used to take the theory linking lipid in the diet with heart disease as gospel. Ravnskov’s The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics, which has around 100 members-some of them cardiologists-says millions of people have been “badgered” into eating a “tedious and flavorless diet” out of fear for their hearts. For instance, Keys did not include data from France, where the occurrence of heart disease was comparatively low at the time despite the nation’s high-fat diet. Critics such as Ravnskov say data points in Keys’ Seven Countries Study were cherry-picked to fit the conclusion. Uffe Ravnskov, a Danish independent researcher based in Lund, Sweden, dismisses the relationship between dietary fats, cholesterol and coronary heart disease, calling it “the greatest medical scandal in modern time”. In the public consciousness, a low-fat diet has been synonymous with good health ever since.īut not everybody agrees. The recommendations advised citizens to reduce their consumption of saturated fat to about 10% of their total energy intake, to lower cholesterol in the blood and therefore decrease the chances of a heart attack. Landmark studies such as these laid the groundwork for the introduction of dietary guidelines in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1970s and 1980s. Around the time that Keys was setting up his trial, the Framingham Study 2 of more than 5,000 residents of a Massachusetts town identified high cholesterol as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease. The findings showed that blood cholesterol levels and heart-attack death rates were highest in countries with diets high in saturated fat, such as the United States and Finland. Keys’ Seven Countries Study, launched in 1958, explored the diet, lifestyle and incidence of coronary heart disease in nearly 13,000 middle-aged men in Finland, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the United States and Yugoslavia 1. Six years later, his face appeared on the cover of Time magazine, in which he urged readers to shun fatty foods such as dairy products and red meat. Then it dawned on him: could there be a correlation between fat in the diet and heart disease? Keys presented his diet–heart hypothesis with gusto at a World Health Organization meeting in 1955. Keys couldn’t understand why high-powered US executives, with access to plentiful food, had much higher rates of coronary heart disease than did people in post-war Europe, where food shortages were common. His findings would fundamentally change the way we eat for decades to come. Shocked by the obituaries mounting up in his local newspaper, physiologist Ancel Keys decided to investigate. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, large numbers of wealthy businessmen in the United States began dying from heart attacks.
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