A great video on saturated fat

science

(Jamie Brown --Carnivore Revolution) #1

A great video on saturated fat


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

It’s always worth remembering that Ancel Keys’s famous Seven Countries Study, responsible for our demonisation of saturated fat, actually studied food intake and coronary heart disease in twenty-two countries. He chose to report on only a third of them, hence the study’s official name.

Interestingly, the association between saturated fat and coronary heart disease that Keys claimed to observe exists only when those seven countries are considered. When all the data for all the countries are analysed, the correlation vanishes. Why this is not considered scientific fraud on Keys’s part is beyond me.

Of further interest is the fact that the correlation observable between sugar and coronary heart disease in the seven-country data, which Keys dismissed out of hand, is still visible when the data from all twenty-two countries are analysed.

At this late date it is difficult to conjecture why Keys rejected this correlation, but it is a known fact that several of his closest friends and colleagues, including Walter Willett at the Harvard School of Public Health were at the time taking money from the sugar industry to downplay the health effects of sugar by maximising the risks of eating saturated fat. (This is attested in an archive of Sugar Association internal memos that were published a few years ago.)


(Jamie Brown --Carnivore Revolution) #3

Yup ancel keys cherry picked his countries to fit his hypothesis.


(Central Florida Bob ) #4

I retired from working in commercial avionics - radios and electronics for commercial aircraft, big and small. If any one of us did what he did with data from experiments, lying with the data intending to show that systems made flying safer, we’d be in jail.

Not the slightest doubt in my mind.


(Jane) #5

And I have worked in chemical plants programming safety systems to keep them from blowing up. And testing the interlocks on a regular basis and documenting the results.

If I did what Keys did, I would be responsible for blowing up a chemical plant, and I couldn’t live with myself. Keys has killed far more people than one plant explosion would, but I bet he had no trouble sleeping at night.