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.
Recent History
January 1, 1965
Harvard Nutritionist Jean Mayer writes to 35 million people that low carb diet is "the equivalent of mass murder."
Jean Mayer, one of the “greats” of nutrition science, said in 1965, in the colourful language that has characterised arguments over diet, that prescribing a diet restricted in carbohydrates to the public was “the equivalent of mass murder.”
January 1, 1967
An “almost embarrassingly high number of researchers boarded the ‘cholesterol bandwagon,’ ” lamented the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association
The dissenting voices were fading. An “almost embarrassingly high number of researchers boarded the ‘cholesterol bandwagon,’ ” lamented the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1967, referring to the narrow, “fervent embrace of cholesterol” to the “exclusion” of other biochemical processes that might cause heart disease. In the pages of sympathetic scientific journals, Ahrens and Mann, plus their handful of like-minded colleagues, continually sent up futile cries against the relentless march of the diet-heart hypothesis, but they were powerless in the face of the elite. As George Mann wrote at the end of his career in 1978, a “heart Mafia” had “supported the dogma” and hoarded research funds. “For a generation, research on heart disease has been more political than scientific,” he declared.
-Nina Teicholz - Page 70
January 1, 1968
Minnesota Coronary Survey
“We were just disappointed in the way it came out,” he said.
There has been a lot of selective reporting and ignoring of the methodological problems over the years. But probably the most astonishing example of selection bias was the near-complete suppression of the Minnesota Coronary Survey, which was an outgrowth of the National Diet Heart Study. Also funded by NIH, the Minnesota Coronary Survey is the largest-ever clinical trial of the diet-heart hypothesis and therefore certainly belongs on the list along with Oslo, the Finnish Mental Hospital Study, and the LA Veterans Trial, but it is rarely included, undoubtedly because it didn’t turn out the way nutrition experts had hoped.
Starting in 1968, the biochemist Ivan Frantz fed nine thousand men and women in six Minnesota state mental hospitals and one nursing home either “traditional American foods,” with 18 percent saturated fat, or a diet containing soft margarine, a whole-egg substitute, low-fat beef, and dairy products “filled” with vegetable oil. This diet cut the amount of saturated fat in half. (Both diets had a total of 38 percent fat overall.) Researchers reported “nearly 100% participation,” and since the population was hospitalized, it was more controlled than most—although, like the Finnish hospital study, there was a good deal of turnover in the hospital (the average length of stay was only about a year).
After four-and-a-half years, however, the researchers were unable to find any differences between the treatment and control groups for cardiovascular events, cardiovascular deaths, or total mortality. Cancer was higher in the low-saturated-fat group, although the report does not say if that difference was statistically significant. The diet low in saturated fat had failed to show any advantage at all. Frantz, who worked in Keys’s university department, did not publish the
