As published in the Wall Street Journal in an article written By Nina Teicholz,
Updated May 6, 2014 10:25 a.m. ET
The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
Are butter, cheese and steak really bad for you? The dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade
"Saturated fat does not cause heart
disease"—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal
Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of
dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in
butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our
arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature
to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter.
The
new study's conclusion shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with modern
nutritional science, however. The fact is, there has never been solid
evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe
this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the
past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science,
politics and bias....
Our distrust of saturated fat can be
traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a
scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably
persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the
nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly
championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a
result, cause heart attacks.
This idea
fell on receptive ears because, at the time, Americans faced a
fast-growing epidemic. Heart disease, a rarity only three decades
earlier, had quickly become the nation's No. 1 killer. Even President
Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. Researchers were
desperate for answers.
As the director
of the largest nutrition study to date, Dr. Keys was in an excellent
position to promote his idea. The "Seven Countries" study that he
conducted on nearly 13,000 men in the U.S., Japan and Europe ostensibly
demonstrated that heart disease wasn't the inevitable result of aging
but could be linked to poor nutrition.
Critics
have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms
in his study. For one, he didn't choose countries randomly but instead
selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia,
Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy
omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of
fat yet didn't suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as
Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study's star subjects—upon
whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is
based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well
into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.
As
it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period
of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake
of measuring the islanders' diet partly during Lent, when they were
forgoing meat and cheese. Dr. Keys therefore undercounted their
consumption of saturated fat. Also, due to problems with the surveys, he
ended up relying on data from just a few dozen men—far from the
representative sample of 655 that he had initially selected. These flaws
weren't revealed until much later, in a 2002 paper by scientists
investigating the work on Crete—but by then, the misimpression left by
his erroneous data had become international dogma.
In
1961, Dr. Keys sealed saturated fat's fate by landing a position on the
nutrition committee of the American Heart Association, whose dietary
guidelines are considered the gold standard. Although the committee had
originally been skeptical of his hypothesis, it issued, in that year,
the country's first-ever guidelines targeting saturated fats. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture followed in 1980.
Other
studies ensued. A half-dozen large, important trials pitted a diet high
in vegetable oil—usually corn or soybean, but not olive oil—against one
with more animal fats. But these trials, mainly from the 1970s, also
had serious methodological problems. Some didn't control for smoking,
for instance, or allowed men to wander in and out of the research group
over the course of the experiment. The results were unreliable at best.
But there was no turning back: Too
much institutional energy and research money had already been spent
trying to prove Dr. Keys's hypothesis. A bias in its favor had grown so
strong that the idea just started to seem like common sense. As Harvard
nutrition professor Mark Hegsted said in 1977, after successfully
persuading the U.S. Senate to recommend Dr. Keys's diet for the entire
nation, the question wasn't whether Americans should change their diets,
but why not? Important benefits could be expected, he argued. And the risks? "None can be identified," he said.
In
fact, even back then, other scientists were warning about the diet's
potential unintended consequences. Today, we are dealing with the
reality that these have come to pass.
One
consequence is that in cutting back on fats, we are now eating a lot
more carbohydrates—at least 25% more since the early 1970s. Consumption
of saturated fat, meanwhile, has dropped by 11%, according to the best
available government data. Translation: Instead of meat, eggs and
cheese, we're eating more pasta, grains, fruit and starchy vegetables
such as potatoes. Even seemingly healthy low-fat foods, such as yogurt,
are stealth carb-delivery systems, since removing the fat often requires
the addition of fillers to make up for lost texture—and these are
usually carbohydrate-based.
The problem
is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes the body to
release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically efficient at storing
fat. Meanwhile, fructose, the main sugar in fruit, causes the liver to
generate triglycerides and other lipids in the blood that are altogether
bad news. Excessive carbohydrates lead not only to obesity but also,
over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart disease.
The
real surprise is that, according to the best science to date, people
put themselves at higher risk for these conditions no matter what kind
of carbohydrates they eat. Yes, even unrefined carbs. Too much
whole-grain oatmeal for breakfast and whole-grain pasta for dinner, with
fruit snacks in between, add up to a less healthy diet than one of eggs
and bacon, followed by fish. The reality is that fat doesn't make you
fat or diabetic. Scientific investigations going back to the 1950s
suggest that actually, carbs do.
The
second big unintended consequence of our shift away from animal fats is
that we're now consuming more vegetable oils. Butter and lard had long
been staples of the American pantry until Crisco, introduced in 1911,
became the first vegetable-based fat to win wide acceptance in U.S.
kitchens. Then came margarines made from vegetable oil and then just
plain vegetable oil in bottles.
All of
these got a boost from the American Heart Association—which Procter
& Gamble, the maker of Crisco oil, coincidentally helped launch as a
national organization. In 1948, P&G made the AHA 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.
After
the AHA advised the public to eat less saturated fat and switch to
vegetable oils for a "healthy heart" in 1961, Americans changed their
diets. Now these oils represent 7% to 8% of all calories in our diet, up
from nearly zero in 1900, the biggest increase in consumption of any
type of food over the past century.
This
shift seemed like a good idea at the time, but it brought many
potential health problems in its wake. In those early clinical trials,
people on diets high in vegetable oil were found to suffer higher rates
not only of cancer but also of gallstones. And, strikingly, they were
more likely to die from violent accidents and suicides. Alarmed by these
findings, the National Institutes of Health convened researchers
several times in the early 1980s to try to explain these "side effects,"
but they couldn't. (Experts now speculate that certain psychological
problems might be related to changes in brain chemistry caused by diet,
such as fatty-acid imbalances or the depletion of cholesterol.)
We've
also known since the 1940s that when heated, vegetable oils create
oxidation products that, in experiments on animals, lead to cirrhosis of
the liver and early death. For these reasons, some midcentury chemists
warned against the consumption of these oils, but their concerns were
allayed by a chemical fix: Oils could be rendered more stable through a
process called hydrogenation, which used a catalyst to turn them from
oils into solids.
From the 1950s on,
these hardened oils became the backbone of the entire food industry,
used in cakes, cookies, chips, breads, frostings, fillings, and frozen
and fried food. Unfortunately, hydrogenation also produced trans fats,
which since the 1970s have been suspected of interfering with basic
cellular functioning and were recently condemned by the Food and Drug
Administration for their ability to raise our levels of "bad" LDL
cholesterol.
Yet paradoxically, the
drive to get rid of trans fats has led some restaurants and food
manufacturers to return to using regular liquid oils—with the same
long-standing oxidation problems. These dangers are especially acute in
restaurant fryers, where the oils are heated to high temperatures over
long periods.
The past decade of
research on these oxidation products has produced a sizable body of
evidence showing their dramatic inflammatory and oxidative effects,
which implicates them in heart disease and other illnesses such as
Alzheimer's. Other newly discovered potential toxins in vegetable oils,
called monochloropropane diols and glycidol esters, are now causing
concern among health authorities in Europe. In
short, the track record of vegetable oils is highly worrisome—and not
remotely what Americans bargained for when they gave up butter and lard.
Cutting
back on saturated fat has had especially harmful consequences for
women, who, due to hormonal differences, contract heart disease later in
life and in a way that is distinct from men. If anything, high total
cholesterol levels in women over 50 were found early on to be associated
with longer life. This counterintuitive result was first
discovered by the famous Framingham study on heart-disease risk factors
in 1971 and has since been confirmed by other research.
Since
women under 50 rarely get heart disease, the implication is that women
of all ages have been worrying about their cholesterol levels
needlessly. Yet the Framingham study's findings on women were omitted
from the study's conclusions. And less than a decade later, government
health officials pushed their advice about fat and cholesterol on all
Americans over age 2—based exclusively on data from middle-aged men.
Sticking
to these guidelines has meant ignoring growing evidence that women on
diets low in saturated fat actually increase their risk of having a
heart attack. The "good" HDL cholesterol drops precipitously for women
on this diet (it drops for men too, but less so). The sad irony is that
women have been especially rigorous about ramping up on their fruits,
vegetables and grains, but they now suffer from higher obesity rates
than men, and their death rates from heart disease have reached parity.
Seeing
the U.S. population grow sicker and fatter while adhering to official
dietary guidelines has put nutrition authorities in an awkward position.
Recently, the response of many researchers has been to blame "Big Food"
for bombarding Americans with sugar-laden products. No doubt these are
bad for us, but it is also fair to say that the food industry has simply
been responding to the dietary guidelines issued by the AHA and USDA,
which have encouraged high-carbohydrate diets and until quite recently
said next to nothing about the need to limit sugar.
Indeed,
up until 1999, the AHA was still advising Americans to reach for "soft
drinks," and in 2001, the group was still recommending snacks of
"gum-drops" and "hard candies made primarily with sugar" to avoid fatty
foods.
Our half-century effort to cut
back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic
quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove
Ancel Keys's hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been
produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to
move on to test other possible culprits for our nation's health woes.
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