Free The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution by Richard David Feinman Page B

[21] .
It
wasn't long, however, before the Secretary of Health in New York State
and a
professor at Berkeley published a paper showing that there were data
from
countries other than the six that Keys had studied. Had he used all of
that
data, the correlation would not have looked so good (described in [22-24] among others) . Keys has
generally been
characterized as a zealot although he was probably more open-minded
than some
of his followers. He was, however, not easily embarrassed and undertook
a study
of seven countries.
    Okay.
Seven
Countries.
    The Seven Countries study on dietary
availability of fat had the
interesting result that the two countries with the highest intake of
fat were
Finland, which had the highest incidence of CVD and Crete, which had
the lowest [25] . It was deduced that
this had to do with the type
of fat, saturated in the case of Finland and unsaturated, in the case
of Crete.
It was later pointed out that there were large differences in CVD
between
different areas of Finland that had the same diet. This
information was ignored
by Keys who was also a pioneer in this approach to dealing with
conflicting
data. In any case, the finding immediately led to the recommendations
to lower
saturated fat, although for most people there was a lingering idea that
it was
good to reduce fat across the board. Health agencies were quite a bit
stronger
at stepping up the pressure on saturated fat but not so good at
admitting the
error in recommending low-fat. This is still the state of affairs. The
real
problem, however, is that the link between saturated fat and heart
disease has
been impossible to establish; direct tests failed right off and
continue to
fail. The story of the political triumph of an idea that was clearly
contradicted by the science has been told numerous times (e.g.,
references [11, 22, 23, 26, 27] )
and yet the phenomenon
still persists. Every time you see a low-fat item in the supermarket
you are
looking at an artifact of one of the most bizarre stories in the
history of
science.
    One of the rarely cited responses to
the
Seven Countries study
was a letter written by researchers at the University of Crete and
published in
the journal Public Health
Nutrition [28] .
The important part of this
letter:
    "In the December 2004
issue of your
journal...Geoffrey Cannon referred to ... the fact that Keys and his
colleagues
seemed to have ignored the possibility that Greek Orthodox Christian
fasting
practices could have influenced the dietary habits of male Cretans in
the
1960s....Professor Aravanis confirmed that, in the 1960s, 60% of the study participants
were fasting during
the 40 days of Lent , and strictly
followed all fasting
periods of the church...periodic abstention from meat, fish,
dairy products, eggs and
cheese , as well as abstention from
olive oil consumption on
certain Wednesdays and Fridays...."
    "....this was not noted in
the study, and no attempt was made to
differentiate
between fasters and non-fasters . In
our view this was a
remarkable and troublesome omission." (my emphasis).
    The whole sorry tale has now been
told many times, most
recently and completely by Nina Teicholz whose exposé of the low-fat
fiasco,
"The Big Fat Surprise" [11] "Surprise" was published as this book was
being
finished, at the moment when the loyalists began scrambling to claim
dedication
to freedom and revolutionary ideas.
    Returning to the
composition of dietary fats.
    Going back to Figure
3.1 , the composition of different dietary
fats turns out to be
somewhat surprising. It is true that there is a lot of oleic acid, the
major
monounsaturated fatty acid, in olive oil (73 %) and canola oil (58%).
Less well
known is that the highest amount is found in avocado oil. Probably most
surprising, however, is that oleic acid makes up almost half of the
fatty acids
in beef tallow and lard (44% and 47 %). Beef tallow, rendered fat, was
what
McDonald's used to use to fry their French fries in – at the time,