As a result of these new industry claims, Dr. Keys ultimately concentrated on
the saturated fats, such as butter, as a culprit behind heart disease.
Sadly, people bought this misinformation campaign wholesale, even though
humans have consumed saturated fat in animal products and butter for thousands
of years. How could we buy into the notion that saturated fats were bad for us,
given that animal fat had fed our evolution and led to our brain development?
How could we buy into the notion that saturated fat causes heart disease when
it is naturally produced in our bodies? Saturated fat is stored in our bodies to be
used for energy when food is not available. It does not interfere with our
hormones or cellular communication. However, this faulty theory gained so
much momentum that large studies were conducted to support it. The most
influential—and flawed—of these was the Seven Countries Study.
The Seven Countries Study
After a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in 1955, Dr. Keys
introduced The Seven Countries Study, a 13-year comparative study of cardiac
disease. The study included people in Greece (including Crete and Corfu),
Finland, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, former Yugoslavia, and the United States,
and the study’s findings showed that the lowest incidence of heart disease
occurred in Greece, with Japan at a close second. There was a higher incidence
of heart disease in all the other countries. An analysis of the countries’ diets
implicated saturated fat as the cause, and the misinformation began.
The advantages of the Mediterranean and Japanese diets should have been
credited to the diets’ relative absence of sugar, hydrogenated fats, and trans fats.
Instead, it was wrongly credited to low consumption of natural saturated fats and
animal products. Dr. Keys erroneously concluded that as people ate more and
more saturated fat and animal products their cholesterol and their likelihood of
heart disease would rise.
In retrospect, one can see that Dr. Keys carefully chose these seven countries
to validate his faulty theory. Data were available for 22 countries. When
researchers plotted other countries with a high saturated fat intake on the same
graph, Dr. Keys’s correlation simply vanished into thin air. For example, the raw
data included Switzerland, a country with a high level of saturated fat intake
from animal products and a relatively low incidence of heart disease, but Dr.
Keys decided not to include it.
The edible oil industry, the beneficiary of these flawed findings, began
funding further research designed to support this saturated-fat theory. Some of
this funding came from Procter & Gamble (makers of Crisco), Mazola (makers