Why was Ancel Benjamin Keys wrong about his famous low-fat diet?

Martin Johnson
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Nina Teicholz, an investigative journalist, has turned the global nutritional community upside down with her best seller — The Big Fat Surprise. In this book, she has documented how the low-fat nutritional advice that has been followed by the US dietary establishment for nearly six decades is completely wrong.

Teicholz’s research, which is covered in The Big Fat Surprise, credits Ancel Benjamin Keys for giving the world this faulty advice that propagated the benefits of eating a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol In her book, Teicholz clearly explains every single reason why Keys’s advice lacked proper scientific research and rigorous evidence.

Due to her book, she was invited to voice her opinions on the origins of the low-fat diet in an MSNBC program, Weekends with Alex Witt. Teicholz, in the program, told Witt that how Keys who “happened to be an incredibly charismatic man” got this low-fat idea successfully “implanted in the American Heart Association.”

It all started in the 1950s when heart diseases began claiming many lives across the world. In 1955, the 34th US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, succumbed to a heart attack. For curbing the rate of early deaths happening due to heart diseases, many scientists proposed numerous theories. One of those scientists was Keys who theorized about his so-called “prudent” diet that was low in saturated fats and cholesterol. Keys was a leading pathologist and biologist from the University of Minnesota, and he directly linked saturated fats to the rise of heart ailments.

Teicholz spent nine long years investigating why consuming a low-fat diet is actually bad for your health; her nine-year research resulted in The Big Fat Surprise. In her book, she explains how Keys’s research was based on good intentions but poor scientific research.

Nevertheless, his desire to find a solution to cardiovascular disease led to the birth of his “Diet-Heart Hypothesis” that made cholesterol and saturated fat entirely responsible for heart disease. Through his research, Keys motivated the US Public Health Service to introduce low-fat dietary guidelines for preventing the rise of heart disease.

Keys’ own evidence from his famous Seven Countries Study failed in many ways to confirm his hypothesis, and was never designed to establish the kind of definitive ‘proof’ that he needed. Teicholz explains how Keys got it all wrong with his hypothesis in one her feature articles published in The Independent.

The first problem, as the author of The Big Fat Surprise explains in her feature, is that Keys did not randomly choose the countries for his study; he did not follow well-defined scientific methods to pick the subjects. Rather, whether intentionally or not, he ended up choosing only those countries that would clearly confirm his hypothesis.

The second problem, writes Teicholz, was that Keys sampled a mere 500 out of the 13,000 men he studied — and the sample did not statistically represent the entire universe of his study. With such defective sample data, any researcher would never be able to identify the true eating habits of the study’s participants.

One other flaw that Teicholz pointed with Keys’s study was that he chose to analyze the men at the island of Crete for completing his research. During part of his research, the men — especially the Orthodox Catholic residents — of this island were observing the religious holiday of Lent and were therefore completely avoiding animal products. Because of this, Keys miscalculated the total amount of saturated fat that men of Crete ate. And that is part of the reason that he erroneously concluded that the good health he found among the men on Crete was the result of their low intake of saturated fat.

Despite each of these flaws, Keys successfully convinced the American Heart Association to adopt his hypothesis in 1961. Even scientists working at the National Institutes of Health were convinced by Keys’ hypothesis. Since everyone was convinced, the USDA eventually issued nationwide dietary guidelines advising Americans to reduce their intake of saturated fat. And this bad rap on saturated fat has remained unchanged for the past sixty years — virtually until Teicholz published The Big Fat Surprise.

Now, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet is Teicholz’s rigorous attempt to show everyone the true benefits of consuming a diet rich in fats, including saturated fats. Through her work and research, Nina Teicholz gives enough scientific evidence and logics about why eating animal fat is good for anyone’s health. Put simply, through her book, she debunks some of the strongest myths that surround the consumption of saturated fat.

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Martin Johnson

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The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

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