Genius Foods

bodies and our relatively limited scientific tools, we should
be intensely skeptical of any rapid, engineered change to
our food supply. When the US government stepped in and
skimmed the fat off the American diet, our leaders fell into
precisely this trap: prematurely applying flawed scientific
observations to policy.
Hoping to put the final nail in the coffin for saturated fat,
Ancel Keys set up what appeared to be a gold-standard
study: a large, long-term, double-blind randomized,
controlled trial called the Minnesota Coronary Survey. If
you recall from chapter 2, Keys was an epidemiologist—he
studied associations in health and disease among large
groups of people. This experiment, which involved more
than nine thousand institutionalized mental patients, was his
chance to prove that the link between saturated fat and heart
disease was a causal one, with an ironclad, rock-solid study
design.
Keys and colleagues put subjects on one of two diets.
The control diet mimicked the Standard American Diet, with
18 percent of calories coming from saturated fat. The
“intervention” diet contained only half that—an amount that
was in line with the nutritional recommendations made by
the American Heart Association and that would later be
adopted by the government. To make up for the missing
calories, subjects were given foods that were cooked or
made with polyunsaturated corn oil, including margarine,
salad dressings, and even corn-oil-“filled” beef, milk, and
cheeses.
Over five years, the study did show that the corn oil
group significantly reduced their cholesterol, but did not