Is the link submitted here throwing 403 errors for other HN users? I notice that many comments here on HN could just as well be responding to the bare title alone, whether or not the participant has read the fine article. Until I can read the article (I can't so far after repeated attempts), I'll give some history of how the cholesterol hypothesis was developed.
Ancel Keys, a member of the Terman longitudinal study of high-IQ children and inventor of the K ration for United States soldiers during World War II,
He did studies of human nutrition, including starvation, in an intellectual milieu that included some of the first studies (by other researchers) on surgery to treat heart disease. (It was the surgical research that prompted my mother, a nurse, to move to Minnesota after completing nursing training in another state.) Keys hoped to find a dietary explanation for the prevalence of heart disease in industrialized countries, and he thought his regression methods of statistical analysis pointed to dietary fat and cholesterol as the main risks factors for heart disease. He lived to the age of 100, so it's hard to say that he was completely crazy in his ideas, but the idea that cholesterol intake from the diet alone is the whole story in heart disease rates is now generally discredited, and it is especially controversial to say that a diet of the kind he recommended is as good for all-cause mortality reduction as it appears to be for heart disease reduction.
Like all other members of the Terman longitudinal study, Keys was never awarded the Nobel Prize. Two young people who were rejected for the Terman study (William Shockley and Luis Alvarez) because their IQ scores were too low later went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics (in separate years).
Ancel Keys, a member of the Terman longitudinal study of high-IQ children and inventor of the K ration for United States soldiers during World War II,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7213-2004Nov2...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/obituaries/23keys.html?_r=...
was active at the University of Minnesota in some key years of his career.
http://mbbnet.umn.edu/firsts/blackburn_h.html
He did studies of human nutrition, including starvation, in an intellectual milieu that included some of the first studies (by other researchers) on surgery to treat heart disease. (It was the surgical research that prompted my mother, a nurse, to move to Minnesota after completing nursing training in another state.) Keys hoped to find a dietary explanation for the prevalence of heart disease in industrialized countries, and he thought his regression methods of statistical analysis pointed to dietary fat and cholesterol as the main risks factors for heart disease. He lived to the age of 100, so it's hard to say that he was completely crazy in his ideas, but the idea that cholesterol intake from the diet alone is the whole story in heart disease rates is now generally discredited, and it is especially controversial to say that a diet of the kind he recommended is as good for all-cause mortality reduction as it appears to be for heart disease reduction.
Like all other members of the Terman longitudinal study, Keys was never awarded the Nobel Prize. Two young people who were rejected for the Terman study (William Shockley and Luis Alvarez) because their IQ scores were too low later went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics (in separate years).