ANCEL KEYS: STILL A PROMINENT ANTI-FAT WANKER AFTER ALL THESE YEARS My fellow hominoids, it has been brought to my attention that Denise Minger and another commentator known simply as Seth have written long posts which claim poor old Ancel Keys was misunderstood and wasnt really the key player in the kicking off the lipid hypothesis that everyone claims. My short response to this is: BULLSHIT. My more considered response would be: Its rather sad to see people buying into the attempts by Minger and Seth (thescienceofnutrition.wordpress/2014/04/21/fat-in-the-diet-and-mortality-from-heart-disease-a-plagiaristic-note/) to diminish or maybe even absolve Keys of his pivotal role in kicking off the anti-saturate, anti-cholesterol sham. Both focus on the technical details of Keys and Yerushalmy/Hilleboes papers, and flippantly ignore the surrounding context. Shit rarely happens in a vacuum, and Keys anti-fat/anti-cholesterol crusade was no exception. Seth seems to be saying pretty much everyone who slams Keys is a Taubes-emulating groupie. Let the record show I was slamming Keys long before Taubes (and probably Minger and Seth) ever wrote anything on the subject. Let me also confirm that my opinion of Taubes has long been, and remains, lower than a snakes gut. I think the guy is full to the brim of merde. Yes, I did cite him in TGCC, but that was on the basis of his The Soft Science of Dietary Fat article that he wrote before his religious conversion to The Latter Day Church of Atkins. I still consider it to be a well-written piece, one written by investigative journalist rather than pretend scientist, one whose quality is far removed from the utter bullshit Taubes has now dedicated himself to propagating. That said... Re the Yerushalmy/Hilleboe paper, yes, as Seth notes, there remained an association between fat and heart disease even after adding in all the countries that Keys conveniently omitted. I would urge people to read the paper for themselves though; Yerushalmy/Hilleboes wording was: ...the scatter of points in Fig. 3 [their graph that contained all 22 Countries] suggests that there is some association in the conventional sense between the two variables; it is therefore necessary, first, to examine the basic data further and, second, to determine whether the association is specific for the two variables. What does this mean? It means that in the narrow band between 30 per cent and 40 per cent dietary fat, there appears the entire gamut of heart disease mortality, ranging from less than 300 per 100,000 for Austria, West Germany, Sweden, Noway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, to 600 or more for Auatralia, Canada, and Finland, and as much as 739 for the United States. Indeed, within this higher dietary fat band seven of the countries have 400 or fewer deaths from heart disease per 100,000, while six have rates of more than 400. Thus, we see that in countries with approximately the same proportion of the diet available as fat, the heart-disease mortality ranges from 220 to 739 per 100,000. How that amounts to any kind of association worth a shit is beyond me, but then again Im one of these strange people that, you know, refuses to buy into this OK, so correlation may not equal causation, but correlation infers/suggests causation! crap that the epidemiology apologists are now pushing. Yeah, sometimes it does...and sometimes it doesnt infer or suggest shit. The latter is the case with Keys epidemiology - his piss-weak associations have since been thoroughly disproved by clinical trials. Ironically, subsequent epidemiology has also failed to support both his Six and Seven Countries wankology. But you never see these studies referred to by the lipid hypothesists. MONICA was the largest study ever conducted on the matter, but its still Keys 6C and 7C studies that are cited ad nauseum (along with rubbish like the LRC-CPPT trial). So tell me again how Keys role has been overplayed? As for the surrounding context, please refer to my book The Great Cholesterol Con. Chapter 5 quotes Keys colleague Henry Blackburn, who describes how Keys was livid when his anti-fat idiology (deliberate spelling there) was first rebuffed by people smarter than him, and developed an angry, driven agenda to prove it at all costs. This gave birth to the 7C Study which, contrary to what Seth claims, was another cherry-picked load of shit whose own results contradict its widely-touted conclusions (also discussed in Chapter 5). Chapter 10 explains how in 1957 the AHA crafted a very cautious report about the lipid hypothesis and refused to give it support until further evidence was in. A few years later, they did an about face, and the AHAs role as shameless anti-cholesterol shill began in earnest. Why the big difference? Well, do you think the fact ardent lipid hypothesist Ancel Keys (and like-minded Jeremiah Stamler) had now joined the AHA team might have made any difference? Naaaaaah... Like I said, Minger and Seth dont even mention any of this, they evidently think a myopic discussion of the Keys 6C and 7C and Y/H data is the be all and end all of the discussion. Its not. Keys even has a widely-used equation named after him for predicting diet fatty acid effects on serum cholesterol. epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/photo.asp?id=779 Tell me again how he wasnt such a big player in the development of the cholesterol sham? Was he the ONLY player? Of course not, no-ones saying that. The vegetable oil industry, then the AHA, NIH, drug companies, and numerous other entities and individuals played pivotal roles also. But to deny Keys was a key and pioneer influence is revisionist BULLSHIT. Believe what you want, but thats my far less myopic 10 cents... Signed, Me.
Posted on: Fri, 02 May 2014 22:50:44 +0000
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