show any benefit whatsoever in terms of heart disease or
overall mortality.^3 This lack of effect was highly
contradictory to much of the nutritional advice being sold to
the American people. We were promised that a reduction in
blood cholesterol by cutting back on saturated fat intake
would improve health outcomes, not stall them. This
“inconvenient truth” might explain why the study results
were published in 1989, a curious sixteen years after the
trial’s end. But the story doesn’t end there.
Max Planck, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, once
remarked that “science advances one funeral at a time,”
referring to the obstinacy of overbearing and fiercely
territorial scientific personalities. This was borne out when,
almost thirty years after the initial publication date of the
Minnesota Coronary Survey, researchers from the National
Institutes of Health and the University of North Carolina
discovered unpublished data packed in boxes in the
basement of one of the study’s now-deceased coauthors—a
close colleague of Ancel Keys.^4
What did the researchers find in this long-buried data?
Upon reanalysis, it seemed the corn oil did have an effect on
the health of participants, but it wasn’t a good one: there
was an overall 22 percent higher risk of death for every 30
mg/dl drop in serum cholesterol. The corn oil group also
had two times as many heart attacks over the five-year
period compared to the saturated fat group. Even though the
corn oil lowered their cholesterol, they were actually having
much worse health outcomes!
The takeaway from this shocking data is that corn and
other processed oils (and sugar) are likely much more