This is not clickbait. I mean it.
Most ‘medical findings’ these days flow from clinical studies whose outcomes are expressed in numbers, probabilities, and statistical analysis. I am not a doctor, but I understand numbers. Numbers ‘talk’ to me. The story that I hear from a recent ‘medical finding’ published by the American Heart Association is: You (reader) are too dumb to understand that we’re lying.
Prof. Ancel Keys was the original source of the worldwide belief that ‘Saturated fat in any amount is bad for your health’. In 1957, Keys published what he called The Seven Countries Study. It was nothing of the kind, and should really have been called the ‘Scattered Villages in Remote Areas and Selected US Railroad Workers Study’. He claimed that this Study proved that saturated fats caused heart disease. For some reason, most of the Medical Establishment and most governments on earth just believed him, despite the many holes in the Study. The Medical Establishment willfully or negligently deceived much of humanity for the past 70 years by endorsing Keys’s astonishingly bad science.
To prove his anti-saturated-fat beliefs, Keys conducted a much more rigorous study a few years later: the 1968-1973 Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE).
Unfortunately for Keys, the MCE soundly disproved his anti-saturated-fat thesis. There was NO difference in mortality between the saturated-fat and ‘healthy-fat’ groups; worse, those with the lowest cholesterol had higher mortality. So Keys did what you or I or any person of negotiable integrity would do: he took his name off the study and got his collaborator to bury it. It remained buried for 40 years. In the meantime, no one in the Medical Establishment asked, ‘by the way, Ancel, where are the results of your MCE that was supposed to confirm that saturated fat is bad?’
Today, members of the Medical Establishment not only stoutly refuse to admit their 70 years of bad advice regarding saturated fat, but they also release MORE bad advice. The general idea seems to be to discredit modern scientific findings that could make us healthier, so that we keep buying unnecessary drugs.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Tirzepatide stand to make hundreds of billions for drug companies. Any lifestyle practice or diet that would help you lose weight without drugs would reduce those billions, wouldn’t it?
One such diet is the Keto Diet, a term we’ll use as shorthand for the group of diets whose practical result is to reduce carbohydrate intake and induce ketosis drastically, the conversion of body fat into ketones.
Ketones are a better body and brain fuel than glucose from carbohydrates. (See my previous articles on Metabolism.) The Keto Diet works and is well-supported by scientific studies and clinical trials.
That’s a lot of drugs, and hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars currently made by Big Pharma, that broader public information on keto diets would endanger.
There is an ongoing campaign to misinform the public about the keto diet. Whoever is behind the campaign, one of their leading acolytes is the American Heart Association, which also insists we need 250 grams (1000 calories) of carbohydrate daily, thereby helping sell lots of diabetes, blood pressure, Parkinson’s, bipolar, and weight-loss drugs.
Do you sniff a Secret Conspiracy here? I’m not going to spell out my Conspiracy Theory for you, but you can figure it out for yourself. This is a continuing series on Basic Nutrition and Metabolism.
Next week: Don’t Trust the American Heart Association (Part 2)