The low-fat fraud

If you ask a room full of dairy industry executives raise their arms if they have heard of Ancel Keys it’s rare for more than one or two people to respond. That’s a pity, because he is the reason why your company markets low-fat yogurts and low-fat milks. Today they make up a large part of dairy sales. But 20 years from now their sales will be in decline as people switch back to full-fat, also because of Ancel Keys.

For 30 years, consumer beliefs, new product development efforts and food industry strategy have lived under a scientific orthodoxy, which held that saturated fats in foods increased the risk of death from heart disease. Surprisingly few people in our industry realise that the focus on reducing fat in foods was the result of the efforts of just one man, whose work is increasingly discredited.

Years lost

One new revelation after another paints a picture of the misleading of western consumers for nearly half a century by proponents of the low-fat hypothesis.

The latest development came in April 2016, when the British Medical Journal featured some never-before-published data undermining a seminal research study from 40 years earlier that, back then, had helped galvanise the negative consensus around saturated fats.

The study, titled Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73), (BMJ2016;353:i1246), looked at a randomized trial, using 9,423 people, which had been designed to test whether replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil reduced coronary heart disease and death by lowering serum cholesterol.

The researchers from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the US Department of Health, as well as a number of universities, recovered data that had been collected during the study but never published. This data was analysed according to hypotheses specified back in the 1960s by the original investigators.

The findings are clear:

  1. Although the intervention did lower blood cholesterol in the subjects, it did not translate to lower risk of death.
  2. In fact, the people who had the greatest reductions in cholesterol had a higher – not lower – risk of death.

This adds to the ever-growing pile of evidence undermining the credibility of the science promoted by Keys, the father of the low-fat hypothesis and the original lead researcher in the flawed Minnesota study.

Keys flawed

In the 1950s Ancel Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota, relentlessly championed the idea that saturated fats raise serum cholesterol in the blood and, as a result, cause heart attacks and increased risk of death.

Keys was in a prime position to promote his idea because he had led the “Seven Countries” study of 13,000 men in seven countries, which ostensibly linked heart disease to diet. In 1961 Keys secured a position on the nutrition committee of the American Heart Association (AHA), whose dietary guidelines were considered a gold standard at that time. Soon after, the AHA issued its first-ever guidelines targeting saturated fats and over the next 20 years the alleged evils of saturated fats became the new orthodoxy.

We now know that what Keys’ studies – from the Seven Countries to the Minnesota Coronary Experiment – all had in common was that they breached several basic scientific norms.

In the Seven study, for example, he looked at more countries than just seven, but selected only those compatible with his hypothesis. France was excluded – a land of high fat consumption but low heart disease – as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn’t suffer from high rates of heart disease.

 

Bad science

Keys appears to have promulgated flawed science. The exact reasons are lost to history, but his high-profile advocacy of a low-fat diet landed the now long-deceased scientist on the cover of Time magazine in 1961.

A half-century of false orthodoxy identified animal fats as the biggest villain in the modern diet, contributed to a harmful turn toward high-carbohydrate diets, dictated an incorrect mainstream approach to nutritional advice and regulation, compelled the food and beverage business to emphasize low-fat products that comprised a poor solution to a misdiagnosed problem. It resulted in the ban of whole milk in school lunches, and arguably contributed significantly to the modern scourge of obesity and Type 2 diabetes instead of mitigating those problems.

The institutional disdain for saturated fats that took hold across the western world had the effect of encouraging consumers to eat carbohydrates instead of fats – at least 25% more since the early 1970s. And because carbs break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin, high carbohydrate consumption actually has emerged as a huge culprit in obesity, Type 2 diabetes and, over time, heart disease.

And the inertia behind the bad science keeps creating more bad science: The new Eatwell guidelines issued in early 2016 by the UK government body called Public Health England, for instance, almost halve the previous recommended daily intake of dairy products because of concerns about fats.

Some nutritionists today blame Big Food for flooding the American diet with high-carb and low-fat foods, especially processed-food giants such as General Mills and Kellogg. They were just following the gold standard of the government, and the government was going by what the scientific community said – and at the time they were relying heavily on flawed studies.

Bring back full fat

The latest revelation in the BMJ closely followed the release of a much more recent study in Circulation, another medical journal, in which consumption of full fat dairy, compared with eating lower fat dairy products, cut the risk of getting diabetes by 46% during the study period among a group of more than 3,300 adults.

“The science around milk fat and whole milk dairy products has tremendously evolved to the point where we can certainly say strongly that dairy products don’t cause heart disease – even whole-milk dairy products – and research is emerging now which shows there might be some benefit to milk-fat consumption,” said Greg Miller, chief science officer of the National Dairy Council.

Time lost

It’ll take some time before the momentum behind a half-century of bad science on saturated fats fully swings the other way.

Industry has got into the habit of capitulating to every demand from health lobbyists and government. Those demands have grown over time – yet despite the industry’s compliance with them, resulting in the removal of fat from tens of thousands of products, the food industry continues to take the blame for poor public health. And it is uniquely the food industry that is blamed – makers of computers and video games are not publicly berated for encouraging sedentary lifestyles, nor are city governments lambasted for making it necessary for people to drive rather than walk or cycle.

The exposing of the scientific void at the heart of public health advice to consume low-fat dairy suggests that, while responsible companies should continue to listen to what public health officials have to say, they should not be so compliant. It is time to reject many of the demands of public health lobbyists. We are at a turning point.

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