Have We Been Lied to All These Years?

Who is Ancel Keys?

Family Vacations. Never a dull moment. A long awaited family trip to Barcelona for the week was just what this mama heart needed. Lots of exploring and learning. Lots of fun, laughter and some crying. Relaxation, and some amazing food and drink. All in all was an amazing time. Vacations are always too short. Don’t you agree?

Now back to the regular scheduled program..

Have we been lied to all these years? And Who is Ancel Keys?

Ancel Keys is not a household name and to be honest I had never heard of him until I read the book - The Big Fat Surprise written by Nina Teicholz. Which is surprising to me, since what he presented to the world was never taught in nutrition school. But his study’s conclusions changed the world of nutrition and the food that we eat as we see it.

Keys played a pivotal role in a certain narrative of health that still today has a stronghold on how the medical establishment looks at saturated fats and cholesterol.

But we have come to understand that his theories and study’s conclusions have untruths, flaws, and discrepancies.

Have we been lied to all these years?

Who is Ancel Keys?

Ancel Keys is the man credited with the discovery of the cause of heart attacks. That is to put it simply. His study, which started in 1953 known as the Seven Countries Study, concluded that people who experienced heart disease tend to have higher levels of cholesterol. And these levels were due to the ingestion of saturated (animal) fats in their diet.

Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

Keys was a biologist and a pathologist from the University of Minnesota. He developed a passion for human physiology and an interest on how nutrition affects the human body. Through his research, he began focusing on cholesterol, fats and their relationship to heart disease. Ancel believed that fat makes people fat!

In the early 1950’s Ancel along with his wife, Margaret (who was a medical technician) took an apparatus for measuring serum cholesterol on a long trip in Europe. Travelling between numerous countries and cities visiting hospitals gathering data and blood samples.

**Note: they chose to measure serum cholesterol because it was the easiest and cheapest of blood fats to measure**

And thus is what lead to the Seven Countries Study.

Seven Countries Study

This study was designed to test Keys hypothesis with a larger subset of data. Keys was determined to show the link between heart disease and fat consumption.

“a rich fatty diet and innumerable fat-loading meals were the probable cause for the development of coronary disease in the majority of cases” Keys (1957)

Rather then going into the full study, I will link more information here:

Seven Countries Study

The study officially launched in 1956 with funding of $200,000 from the US Public Health Service. The published study was following 12,700 middle aged men from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, Netherlands, Japan and the USA. Of course with the countries studied, their diets were indicative of the Mediterranean region. Olive oil and fish were the main sources of fat and protein.

Ancel Keys and the Seven Countries Study concluded that:

High levels of cholesterol in blood serum are associated with a high risk of CHD mortality

Keys believed from his observations, that is was the saturated fat that was consumed that increased cholesterol, and that there was a causal relationship to heart disease and high cholesterol levels. And reducing your risk of heart attack was to reduce your cholesterol levels.

But There Were Flaws

Many scientist and journalists like Nina Teicholz, have found many flaws in this study. Which is explained more in her book - The Big Fat Surprise.

So what were some of the flaws and criticisms of this study?

**First it is an observational study which does not prove causation.

What is an observational study? - Basically all the nutrition advice we hear today from health organizations, media and doctors alike are observational studies. This type of study is fundamentally unable to show cause and effect. Why? Because these studies are based on the researchers observations. No interventions and no manipulating variables. It is very hard to find a random controlled study in nutrition, which is the gold standard of studies. Researchers collect data such as lifestyle, food journal and health history and then take the data and group together common points. But because 2 things might be found together, this does not mean one caused the other. Correlation does not prove causation.

**Second that they found this data to be cherry picked. Keys actually had data from 22 different countries and did not use all the data.

**Thirdly, Keys did not take into account the sugar intake of his subjects. Was it the sugar or was it the fat? Insulin resistance was never discussed as a possibility.

Ancel Keys was known to be blunt, very intelligent but also describes as arrogant and rude. There was no questioning his findings at the time. And there were many food companies that used this study’s conclusions to push their own products on the market. This is where is the influx of ‘vegetable oils’ came from as it was said that polyunsaturated fats were the healthier option (such as soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil).

So this narrative was what the medical establishment went with. High cholesterol leads to heart disease and high cholesterol levels in the blood is due to the food that we eat.

But after many years Ancel Keys finally came out with a comment he knew to be true.

In 1987 Ancel Keys was quoted in New York Times

“I’ve come to believe that cholesterol is not as important as we used to think it was”

By that time his hypothesis was deeply rooted in the public health message even though there were many studies and doctors our there that did not agree with this message.

Stay tuned for Part 2 on Cholesterol, Is it the Bad Boogey Man They Say It Is?

Danni