If you haven’t read Part 1, please do — the following will make a lot more sense.
Ancel Keys
In addition to the Minnesota Coronary Survey, Ancel Keys was responsible for the Six Countries Study, which measured the use of saturated fat substitutes like margarine and vegetable oils against cardiac disease rates. His findings clearly showed a correlation between saturated fat consumption and heart-related illness. Case closed.
There was just one problem: There weren’t six countries in the study; there were twenty-two, and Keys simply kept the six that looked good on the chart and corroborated his bias. [see image]
The American Heart Association
The AHA was a small organization no one had ever heard of between it’s founding in 1924 and the late 1940’s, when it was given 1.5 million dollars – about 30M in today’s money – by Procter & Gamble. You probably know P&G as the maker of various soaps and beauty products, but you may not know (because why would you care?) that they introduced Crisco in 1911.
Of course the fine, upstanding medical professionals of the AHA remained completely unbiased and were not the least bit compromised by the knowledge that their benefactor manufactured and sold crystallized cottonseed oil.
Right.
Aww, Sugar
Oh money, money.
The Food Pyramid
This perfect storm of buried studies, manipulated studies, and the co-opting of institutions by special interests is why we have the Food Pyramid. Sweden (of meatball fame, strangely enough) adopted the first pyramid in the 1970s. The United States didn’t make it official until the early 1990s, even though the low-fat-everything craze had started at least a decade prior.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, this is exactly the period when the obesity rate in the U.S. started it’s meteoric rise from approximately 10%, where it had hovered for decades, to where it is now at over 40% – and rising. And yet, thirty years later, every “Nutrition Facts” label tells us the RDA of carbohydrate is 300 grams, despite the fact there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate.
If all this sounds a little too much like conspiracy theory, well, stay tuned for Part 3.
Thanks for reading,
Dan
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