1911, Proctor & Gamble introduce Crisco.
In the early 1900s, an evil genius at Procter and Gamble came up with the idea to use cotton seeds — a toxic waste product — and turn them into a cooking oil.
P&G used cottonseed oil for candles and soap, but later discovered that they could hydrogenate the oil into a solid that resembled animal fats.
Behold…Crisco.
Crisco was adeptly marketed as a more versatile butter.
They're always trying to compete and replace butter.1948, Nina Teicholz writes in The Wall Street Journal, “In 1948, P&G made the AHA [American Heart Association] the beneficiary of the popular ‘Walking Man’ radio contest, which the company sponsored. The show raised $1.7 million for the group and transformed it (according to the AHA’s official history) from a small, underfunded professional society into the powerhouse that it remains today.”
1952, Keys presents his diet-heart hypothesis at an Amsterdam Conference.
1955, General Eisenhower, and now President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, has a heart attack, thrusting heart disease to the front of American medicine.
The dumpy and sloppy science in Ancel Keys' 7-Countries Study led to life-threatening heart disease for massive numbers in the population. Today, heart disease is the second-leading cause of death.
1957, Perushalmy and Hilleboe presented a more comprehensive study with more countries included.
1958, 15-year, Seven Countries Study [Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States] begins. Clearly, medical science does not mind sacrificing your relatives, family, and friends. In that study,
Among 11,579 men ages 40-59 without evidence of cardiovascular disease, 2,289 died in 15 years.
Those were the results, but there were other sloppy scientific procedures in that study.
France, Switzerland and Chile were outliers with high fat consumption but low instances of heart disease – all left out of Keys’ study. With all twenty-two countries included, there was no longer any statistical significance.
Not only did Keys cherry pick seven countries, he bypassed one of the most important scientific notions: correlation is not equal to causation.
1961, the American Heart Association recommended that butter should be replaced with polyunsaturated seed oils, and that animal fats should be avoided. The aim was to lower cholesterol levels.
1968-1973, The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE). From Dr. Cate,
Ancel Keys and the president of the Minnesota chapter of the AHA, Dr. Ivan Frantz, designed one of the largest, most rigorous experiments ever conducted to test an important question: how do vegetable oils affect our health. Called The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE), it was the highest-quality kind of study, a double-blind randomized controlled trial. And it was huge, a massive undertaking involving thousands of adult residents of six state mental hospitals and one nursing home, where inmates had no choice but to eat what was put in front of them and so compliance with the experimental diets was practically guaranteed.
Carnivore Aurelius writes,
Despite these factors, Keys’ study has been cited over 1 million times, and it would go on to become the cornerstone of dietary guidance. It’s also why people are repulsed when they see you guzzle down a plate of steak and bacon.
Basically, the conclusion was as follows:
Coronary heart disease tends to be related to cholesterol.
Cholesterol tends to be related to saturated fat.
Thus, coronary heart disease is related to saturated fat.
This shouldn’t have gotten a passing grade in a high school science class, let alone direct our country’s nutritional approach.
The hypothesis that saturated fat causes heart disease became accepted as truth before it was rigorously tested. We were in a public health crisis and the public demanded certainty.
By 1961, the American Heart Association recommended that butter should be replaced with polyunsaturated seed oils, and that animal fats should be avoided. The aim was to lower cholesterol levels.
