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January 1, 1963

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Stamler's book is published as a “professional” red leather edition by the Corn Products Company

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Your Heart Has Nine Lives

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While Keys and others firmly believed that polyunsaturated oils would help prevent heart disease due to their cholesterol-lowering properties, it’s also true that the AHA received millions of dollars in support from the food companies that manufactured those oils. Remember that the AHA’s very launch as a nationally influential group in 1948 depended upon Procter & Gamble’s “Truth or Consequences” radio show. Campbell Moses, AHA medical director in the late 1960s, even posed with a bottle of Crisco Oil in an AHA educational film. And remarkably, when Jerry Stamler reissued his 1963 book, Your Heart Has Nine Lives, it was published as a “professional” red leather edition by the Corn Products Company and distributed free of charge to thousands of doctors. Inside, Stamler thanks both that company and the Wesson Fund for Medical Research for “significant” research support. “Scientists in public health must make alliances with industry,” he told me, unabashedly, when I asked him about the connection. “It’s tough.”

Stamler is correct; nutrition studies are expensive and funding sources limited (although less so in his day), and researchers have long solicited food companies to fill the financing gap. Yet one could reasonably argue that the connections forged by Stamler, Keys, and others in those early days had an exceptionally outsized influence on the course of the American diet. Replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils, after all, became the backbone of the “prudent diet,” which endures to the present day.

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	Dietary Guidelines	Dietary guidelines are evidence-based recommendations that provide guidance on healthy eating patterns and lifestyle choices to promote overall health and prevent chronic diseases. These guidelines are typically developed by government agencies or expert committees and are updated periodically based on the latest scientific research. This site heavily questions basic assumptions within the dietary guidelines and shows conflicts of interest in their creation.
	Diet-Heart Hypothesis	The diet-heart hypothesis, also known as the lipid hypothesis, proposes that there is a direct relationship between dietary fat intake, particularly saturated fat and cholesterol, and the development of heart disease. It suggests that consuming high amounts of these fats leads to an increase in blood cholesterol levels, specifically low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, which in turn contributes to the formation of atherosclerotic plaques in the arteries. Some consider this hypothesis nothing more than wishful thinking.