

Are some diets “mass murder”? - con-templative
http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7654

======
con-templative
> Teicholz begins her examination by pointing out that the Inuit, the Masai,
> and the Samburu people of Uganda all originally ate diets that were 60-80%
> fat and yet were not obese and did not have hypertension or heart disease.

> The hypothesis that saturated fat is the main dietary cause of
> cardiovascular disease is strongly associated with one man, Ancel Benjamin
> Keys, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. He was clearly a
> remarkable man and a great salesman, described by his colleague Henry
> Blackburn (whom I’ve had the privilege to meet) as “possessing a very quick,
> bright intelligence” but also “direct to the point of bluntness, and
> critical to the point of skewering.”8

> Keys launched his “diet-heart hypothesis” at a meeting in New York in 1952,
> when the United States was at the peak of its epidemic of heart disease,
> with his study showing a close correlation between deaths from heart disease
> and proportion of fat in the diet in men in six countries (Japan, Italy,
> England and Wales, Australia, Canada, and the United States).9 Keys studied
> few men and did not have a reliable way of measuring diets, and in the case
> of the Japanese and Italians he studied them soon after the second world
> war, when there were food shortages. Keys could have gathered data from many
> more countries and people (women as well as men) and used more careful
> methods, but, suggests Teicholz, he found what he wanted to find. A
> subsequent study by other researchers of 22 countries found little
> correlation between death rates from heart disease and fat consumption, and
> these authors suggested that there could be other causes, including tobacco
> and sugar consumption.

