More Rewriting of Ancel Keys and History Courtesy of Dr. Cate Shanahan
As I mentioned in my "opening post" on the matter of Ancel Keys, one of the inspirations was listening, for the umpteenth time, to a low carber blaming our ills on the "low fat diet" we were all duped into switching to by Ancel Keys. In this case, it was Dr. Cate Shanahan:
Reversing Diabetes ^Knowledge Summit this past May.
This woman wrote a book called Deep Nutrition with her ghost-writer husband Luke who has absolutely ZERO relevant background in the subject matter. That book is an abomination. Seriously. As she possesses an MD (how she's board certified and practicing eludes me at this point!), the misinformation it contains on basic matters is even more potentially dangerous than that put out by some of the other diet gurus out there.
If anyone is interested in more ridiculousness by Shanahan, they can check out my label here: Cate Shanahan. So as I was reminded of this the past day or so, I thought I'd check to see what she had to say about old A.Ben in her book. Oh my. She didn't disappoint, and may have even bested Teicholz's obvious disdain for the man with her rhetoric. In honor of her book cover, I shall use green for the excerpts from Chapter 8 in her book, a chapter entitled: Good Fats and Bad, How the Cholesterol Theory Created a Sickness Epidemic.
The Man Who Brought Us the Low-Fat Campaign
It’s 1958. A tall, fit Ancel Keys stands before a laboratory chalkboard on a popular CBS news show entitled “The Search” to warn us of something he calls “The new American plague.” Onscreen, we see a row of ten little wooden men standing on Keys’ desk. He flicks five of them with his finger, knocking them over as he speaks: “You know the chief killer of Americans is cardiovascular disease. Of ten men we can expect five to get it.” From that moment forward, America would turn to Keys for advice on preventing heart disease.
Leaving aside Shanahan's obsession with physical characteristics, it was a real "epidemic" of heart disease amongst relatively affluent middle aged men that sparked Keys' interest in the field. If anyone can get this footage I'd love to see it!
The father of the “diet-heart hypothesis” was not a cardiologist or even an MD. Keys had earned his PhD in the 1930s studying salt-water eels. His nutritional credentialing originated in the fact that, during WWII, the military assigned him to create the ready-to-eat meal that could be stored for years and shipped to millions of soldiers.
This is pretty rich coming from someone whose grasp of biochemistry is so poor she thinks sugar is sticky because it glycates the proteins in your skin. I don't suppose Cornell is too proud of the fact that she claims to have "trained" there. I don't care if my critics get their panties bunched when I bring this up, but Cate's bio statements of being "trained" using the name of a prestigious institution is resume inflation plain and simple. She has no degree from Cornell and for all we know she failed the biochemistry and genetics classes she took there. Considering that she purports herself to be an expert, this matters. Also, considering her own lack of apparent relevant education and experience, it's especially ironic she should seek to belittle Keys'. Keys holds not just one, but two PhD's -- receiving the second in Physiology from Cambridge after extensive post graduate work from the first in Oceanography & Biology ... which followed an MS in Zoology and a BA in Economics & Political Science. In between PhDs, he taught Biochemistry at Harvard, to say nothing of all that transpired before he founded his lab in Minnesota. Can we dispense with the Keys as scientific illiterate nonsense? As to cardiology, Keys presumably learned a thing or two in his travels around the world with Dr. White ... which travels were the informal precedent for the Seven Countries Study. Take it away Cate!
Dr. Keys named his pocket-sized meal the K-ration, after himself. When the war was over, the Minnesota public health department hired Keys to study the problem of rising rates of heart attacks. But ego got the better of him.I've now read quite a few accounts of Keys and Minnesota ... I don't think it quite went this way. As to Keys' ego? Eh ... just throw that in to bait the reader.
At his first scientific meeting he presented the idea that, in countries where people ate more animal fat, people died of heart disease more often, suggesting a possible causative relationship. But his statistical work was so sloppy (see figure) that he was lambasted by his peers.
OK ... here is her figure.
Do we even need to discuss all that is wrong with this picture? Mark Sisson has this woman speaking at PrimalCONs, she will be doing some sort of metabolic counseling for him, she is touted in articles and such as an expert advising The Lakers, based on some coach reading this book. Apparently she thought it cute to replace data points with hearts, but it is not very cute to "reproduce" data by changing it. She never cites the original for comparison. Dr. Cate Shanahan, I'm calling you out for your deception and inaccuracies. I've extended the x-axis to 50% and played with the aspect ratios to closely match the scaling of the original plot in Yerushalmy & Hilleboe to that of Shanahan. I've also dropped a vertical at 25% fat so you can get a better idea of the Shananagans afoot.
Yeah, nothing like making up data while doling out accusations of deception. SHAME ON YOU CATE. You really ought to be embarrassed. Oh ... and just where did that 23rd country come from??
Rather than cleaning up his act, Keys vowed vengeance: “I’ll show those guys.”198Clean up your act.
More than anything else, it seems, Keys wanted everyone to think he single-handedly discovered the cause of heart disease. And so did the country’s margarine producers, who now had the perfect spokesperson. Though Keys’ work failed to convince professional scientists (at least for the first decade or two), the margarine industry knew he still had a shot at convincing the man on the street. If the public thought butter and other animal fats would “clog their arteries,” they might buy margarine instead.Professional scientists? I.just.can't.
A few years after the embarrassing performance in front of an audience capable of sniffing out misleading statistics, Keys was on TV laying out those same, misleading statistics to a trusting public.
How about making up graphs and presenting them to trusting readers who are capable of counting?
The American Heart Association, which depends on large donations of cash from the vegetable oil industry, jumped on the bandwagon with Keys. They took his sloppy statistics and ran, eventually convincing most doctors that “steak is a heart attack on a plate” and margarine made from hydrogenated vegetable oils (full of trans fat) was healthy. Within a decade, grocery store shelves were loaded with ready-to-eat foods, and Americans were buying. No longer insisting on fresh food from small farmers right in our neighborhoods, we’d been convinced that products made in distant factories were safer, healthier, and better. Funny thing is, they were also cheaper. But even Keys had his doubts about eating them.
Oops! Everything I Said About Saturated Fat Was Really About Margarine —Paraphrasing Ancel Keys, PhD
I interrupt this version of revisionist history to point out that the formatting -- bolded and apart from the text -- was Shanahan's, and her own sloppy "statistics" are evidence that she should not even attempt to paraphrase anyone. And now to finish up our excerpt with some Ancel Keys time travel.
By 1961, under increasing scientific scrutiny, Keys began to waver in his support for his own (now publicly accepted) diet-heart hypothesis.199 Scientists had pointed out Dr. Keys’ misleading use of scientific terms. In public, he denounced animal fat as the culprit behind the rising rates of heart attacks. But in his laboratory and human experiments, he didn’t use animal fat.200 His subjects were fed margarine made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. And what was in the margarine? Trans fat—a full 48 percent! To conclude from studies that used hydrogenated vegetable oil that animal fat causes heart disease is utterly nonsensical.
Unfortunately, the public never heard the straight story. Because margarine contains saturated fat (made during the hydrogenation process that also generates trans fat), industry had the opening they needed to put an antisaturated-fat spin on Keys’ findings. Ignoring the presence of trans (and other distorted fats in margarine), spokesmen simply blamed saturated fat. And on TV, Keys equated saturated fat with animal fat, completing the deception.201 This ingenious spin on the facts is akin to poisoning rats with strychnine-laced milk and then blaming the deaths on the milk.
The anti-saturated fat, anti-cholesterol ball was rolling along nicely, and there was so much money being made selling “healthy” low-cholesterol, low-fat processed foods, the rolling ball wasn’t going to be easy to stop. All the news reports you’ve ever heard on the hazards of saturated fat and cholesterol have been based on studies that were performed by using hydrogenated vegetable oil full of unnatural molecules that aren’t found in butter, steak, or any natural food.202 With so much junk science saturating the media, professionals who give nutritional advice need to go beyond the sound bites to find the truth for themselves. While it’s easy to go with the flow and tell patients to “cut out animal fat,” doing so turns well-meaning healthcare practitioners into unwitting participants in an ongoing campaign to sell high profit-margin man-made substitutes for natural foods—substitutes which, in turn, make people ill.
198. Health Revolutionary: The Life and Work of Ancel Keys (movie, dead link to online source)199. Hydrogenated fats in the diet and lipids in the serum of man. Anderson JT. J Nutr. 75(4):338, 1961
200. Hydrogenated fats in the diet and lipids in the serum of man. Anderson JT. J Nutr. 75 (4):338, 1961201. Health Revolutionary: The Life and Work of Ancel Keys202. Tracing citations in consensus articles and other policy setting research statements leads us back to Keys and his junk science. Case in point, the 2004 National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) coordinating committee issued an update to the third Adult Treatment Panel (ATP III) Consensus panel statement
I would repeat my request the CBS footage and also put in a request for the movie from 198/201. The link in her book is dead and I've had no search love as of yet. As to the duplicated reference 199/200, that full text is available here. This 1961 paper opened with:
In man, the average cholesterol response in the serum to changes in the dietary fat can be predicted reasonably well when only the common natural fatty acids are in volved (Keys et al., '57, '59; Turpeinen et al., '60). Whether the same relationships hold with the unnatural fatty acids produced by hydrogenation is uncertain.
This would be the study Teicholz slanders Keys' over in her book -- describing it as being ethically questionable because it was conducted in a mental hospital. It's beyond the scope of this post and my time availability to look into this further. I'll leave this line of inquiry to anyone who feels so inclined. But her "dismantling" of Keys doesn't even make good on her promise of how Keys brought the low fat diet to America. Her tale weaves a picture of a man who merely wanted to poison us all with hydrogenated vegetable oils, the more the better. Sometimes when you seek to demonize you contradict yourself, and Shanahan does that quite often in this book. (Later in the chapter, she cites the exploding rates of cardiac deaths in 1950, the same deaths she makes Keys out to be exaggerating to drive his agenda in he opening paragraph).
I think this post provides ample evidence for why Deep Nutrition should be pulled from the shelves and apologized for, not touted as any sort of academic work by a serious medical professional.
Comments
I love the work you do here. I hope you or one of your informed readers could respond. I just want to make sure I'm following here, so I hope you consider this on topic.
1) Keys was basically one of the first to suggest the lipid hypothesis, the idea that cholesterol was linked to heart disease, and that saturated fat was the suspected culprit. 2) In response, much research has been done on the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil, typically polyunsaturated (n-6 and n-3) rich ones, and that this body of research has shown significant benefits from this change. But people like Shanahan, paleos, Taubes, etc, argue that saturated fat isn't so bad after all because 3) a couple of very recent meta reviews have challenged the link between saturated fat and mortality, and 4) people replaced saturated fat with junk food, which doesn't invalidate the research highlighted in point 2 but provides a convenient whipping boy for criticizing the dietary recommendation based on this research like we see here.
Here's where I get confused: 5) research hasn't really shown beneficial effects from saturated fat (?) but 6) research has shown that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat is good, though due to the recent meta reviews 7) saturated fat might not be that bad (perhaps a neutral effect on health)? What sensible conclusions can we draw from these recent findings in light of the existing research? I always thought the connection between saturated fat and cholesterol was well understood, and it looks like the meta reviews (2014, Chowdhury and 2010, Siri-Tarino) were only looking at mortality, so what can we make of this? I know there were problems with the 2014 meta-review, so is this just a blind alley?
Help! This is all very confusing for a lay-person like me, but I do try to familiarize myself with the existing body of research and significant studies to evaluate health claims.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOifkb4JlfY
Where are the 100 year old low carbers? Name a few? One? As a matter of fact name ONE single long lived society that THRIVED on high fat low carb! ONE! JUST ONE!
Or if you prefer show me one elite coach using or one athlete thriving on a 100% keto/low carb diet. One. Just one.
Why fight the science & proven training/dietary protocols of elite athletes & long lived societies? Is it a "rebel without a cause" syndrome that makes some look for obscure hidden covert & conspiratorial scenarios to explain SIMPLE & verifiable outcomes?
Much of Stamler's response to Siri Tarino is irrelevant to the actual meta-analysis, and his relevant points were taken into consideration by Siri Tarino which did not change the conclusions.
These people have to get over the fact that there is simply no association in cohort studies, even though much of the bias may actually be against saturated fat (e.g. residual confounding).
http://vimeo.com/36453136
Good grief. This woman thinks pasta gets turned to fat, that carbohydrates raise cholesterol, that LDL particles interact with lipoprotein lipase, and that low carb consistently gets people's LDL (I assume she means cholesterol, not particle number) under 40. I eat a very low-fat, high-fiber diet and my LDL cholesterol is 59 mg/dl. 40 mg/dl- you're probably looking at cancer or a genetic defect. 140 mg/dl is more low carb territory.
I recall Paul Jaminet defending this as being triglycerides ... and perhaps so, but for the fact that these were prepared talks not really interviews. I would think some review of slides before the final product was packaged up occurred (or should have).
I know too well that it is easy to misspeak but at some point she should have heard herself. Plus -- the VLDL -> fat is equally erroneous.
Or completely plant-based and reversing CAD like Joe Crowe, M.D. whose TC was 89 and LDL 39 without statins. So much for carbohydrates that kill.
"They argue that contrary to everything we have been told before, saturated fat is healthy. Additionally they say that ALL carbohydrates convert into sugar once consumed. It's a myth that complex carbs are good for you, it's simply that they are not as bad as simple carbs, as they take longer to be absorbed.
Lutz and Allan have devised what they call a utilizable carbohydrate; it' the amount of carbs that actually gets absorbed into your body, so depending on what you are eating it will have a utilizable measure, which should be restricted to 72g per day in total. You can then eat as much as you like - just the carbs are restricted.
I take 10mgs/day Atorvastatin + several supplements to lower cholesterol
Lutz was a vicious proponent of saturated fats. "Jimmy Moore style" I'm inclined to call it. As written above, he suggest to slather butter on pieces of cheese several time in his books, and strongly argues against the idea that "animal fat" as he calls it is detremental to health.
Well, luckily he also claims very far-reaching bullshit beyond that, so that at least the not completely retarded reader will see some red lights on the way through the book. I will never forget this "interesting" theory about carbs, male pattern baldness and the "true cause" for sexual assaults...
Basically, would it be correct to say that the research which explored the diet hypothesis of CHD primarily 1) condemns saturated fat, 2) shows the benefit of polyunsaturated fats, or 3) both 1 + 2? I ask because I appears that the line of reasoning that saturated fat advocates seem to pursue is that saturated fat isn't so bad because it raises both LDL and HDL so the end result is a wash (knocking down conclusion 1), all the while trying to implicate n-6 as causing inflammation, oxidation, etc (trying to knock down conclusion 2), implying that one is better off eating butter than canola oil in spite of a solid body of research. This is basically what Mark Sisson does for his "definitive guide to saturate fat," all the while parroting the Keyes lines, etc.
I don't think that Charles meant to imply much outside simply adding in a partial reference for the character when mentioned, which is kind of his thing in these discussions. Quaint trait, but very much of value and appreciated.
The dosage could be reduced to 10mgs EOD - however - I'll be taking a follow-up CT Scan in Sept 2015 - since the CAC score increased slightly (from 30 in 12/2007 to 48 in 2/14) I may wait to adjust the stain doasge until I see if there id progression/regression on the plaque - I'm concerned since the plaque is located on the LAD - the "widow maker"
What is really crazy is trying to figure outthe roles of leptin, adiponectin, osteocalcin, PYY, incretins etc etc, as if THAT will give us an answer! It won't. The issue is a macro one. Sugar and carbs! Looking at the Kitava is interesting because their high carb diet ressembles not a whit of what we have in the high carb western diet. Their caloric intake is about 30% less than the averge Australian or American. That should say it all! Volumes of crap food! LCHF works wonders! I have a large volume of data on the blood work on people who have begun a LCHF diet--- cholesterol and LDL do rise but who cares since they play no part in causing CVD. Of interest would be the VLDL, oxidized version, but that is not easily obtainable in Australia. The calculated lipid panel is next to worthless.
On LCHF, HDL goes up too and triglycerides fall, the latter possibly being of some benefit. I see many people's blood work based on their so called healthy diet (fruit, yoghurt, whole grains, oats) and they are not exceptionally healthy people. I'd rather be a Hadza!
Also, the vaunted cardiovascular health of the Inuit may be more factoid than fact.
http://www.onlinecjc.ca/article/S0828-282X%2814%2900237-2/abstract
Yes. Of course, carbs are the problem. Evolution's also been disproved by some YouTube dolt who looks like the incestuous love child of Fred Durst and Kevin James.
Lol.
1. It is probably totally irrelevant whether or not Keys cherry-picked in 1953 and/or in his selection of countries to study in Seven Countries. The charges are NOT irrelevant. If Keys were alive Shanahan would be blasted out of the water for her garbage. Yes, it is offensive for her to charge Keys Faked It, make baseless charges about his selection process, and then present a bunch of made up data with no attribution to her muse as "The Truth". Beyond offensive.
2. Seven Countries was not based on the 1950 data. That was the study from which most of Keys contributions in this regard come. So you are falling for the lies and contortions here.
3. Yes, on top of everything else, more refined carbs became the problem in 1980. Please show me where Ancel Keys had one iota to do with that. CarbSane is about presenting the full science behind LCHF theories blaming carbs. We didn't cut our fat, we added carbs on top of our high fat diet. Amazing how calories count ....
4. So you have volumes of anecdotal LCHF data. Stop eating crap carbs. That's not rocket science. Eat a plain potato instead of french fries. Sheez. There is NO data, not one single study showing that an LCHF diet improves mortality risk, health, etc. Not one. Trials on pseudo-LC not even HF diets don't count either, and especially short term weight loss studies do not count (or we should eat Twinkies for health). Unverifiable anecdotes do not count, but while we're on that subject, the long term adherents and advocates of that diet don't have a great track record ....
5. Raising HDL past restoring low levels to normal has never been shown to be beneficial (Dayspring). The lowering of trig levels in the ranges most are talking about is not meaningful either. Here's data I'd like to see: hepatic fat content, IMCL and pancreatic fat content.
6. I don't get the Hadza reference.
I can't believe your comment:
"It is probably totally irrelevant whether or not Keys cherry-picked in 1953 and/or in his selection of countries to study in Seven Countries. The charges are NOT irrelevant"
You HAVE to be joking.
That comment simply leaves me speechless... it renders all the rest of your comments as suspect as Keys!.
The Hadza data is also in front of me- It is certainly not high in fat but it is definitely not high carb and they do consume the animals' fat.
Fasting triglycerides improve in the fasted LCHF states but rise beyond normal after food, based on the studies you supplied: the results in those studies are insignificant and belong to the same statistical raquet seen in studies on blood pressure calling a 1 to 2 mm Hg difference significant.
Since there is no workable hypothesis about cholesterol er. LDL, er, VLDL, er LDL particle, er, oxidized particle... oh well, wherever it is going, the fact remains animal fat is delicious healthy while PUFAs are foreign and unhealthy.
And, without knowing wnat my data are about LCHF, and where I got thenm from and to assume they are just anecdotal tells me how much you care about facts! It is intellectual dishonesty to infer and fabricate!
You wrote: >>>I am trying to make sense of your discussion about Ancel Keys. It seems you support his hypotheses and you took offense at the suggestion he fiddled the data- he may or may not have, because it is irrelevant. His data were based on unreliable sources and his observations about post war diets in the Mediterranean were irrelevant to what occurred baefore and after the war. Ancel Keys was wrong about saturated fat.<<<
I took this to mean that it doesn't matter if Keys fiddled with his data, that is irrelevant. Perhaps you meant it doesn't matter that he fiddled with irrelevant data? I don't know, but the topic of THIS post is that it DOES matter when someone levels baseless charges like Cate Shanahan did. Even if Keys was guilty of cherry picking, that is still not "faking it" -- you do realize that Seven Countries Study was NOT the 1953 plot ... right? You don't accuse someone of malfeasance and turn around and use your own obviously made up data points to illustrate "the truth".
Equating Keys to McDougall has me thinking you are not being serious. Also you keep talking about all the data and papers in front of you. If you wish to continue this discussion please link to or at least name the studies to which you are referring. This is why I presume your LCHF data is anecdotal. There is none in the literature for anything long term for a diet remotely resembling modern LCHF. NONE. Meanwhile you "know" unhealthy people following a "healthy" diet ... which is very scientific as you bash a true scientist who contributed immensely to the field.
Postprandial triglycerides are a much bigger problem than fasting. But keep pointing to lipid biomarkers that have not been shown to be highly predictive or relevant and ignore those that have.
Now cut that out Kade! My computer has finally recuperated from the last keyboard soaking ;-)
The gut bacteria do reflect the division of labor, however, both genders partake if all the food gathered and hunted.
Women selectively forage for tubers and plant foods, and spend a great deal of time in camp with children, family members and close friends. Men are highly mobile foragers and range far from the central camp site to obtain game meat and honey. Although all foods are brought back to camp and shared, men and women consume slightly more of their targeted foods from snacking throughout the day.
OK, so the guys eat more meat while they're out on the road. However, their gut microbiome reveals a general dietary pattern. Even though more meat is eaten during the dry season,
Foods like baobab, tubers and honey are targeted year round. On the basis of these data, the resulting picture is a diet rich in simple sugars, starch and protein while lean in fat.
Got that? No LCHF paradise for the Hadza. Not even the guys.
Source:
Gut microbiome of the Hadza hunter-gatherers
Finally, Keys = McDougall? R U kidding? Keys was never a vegan or vegetarian. He never recommended, nor did he eat, a diet devoid of animal foods. You can't even compare him to "10% animal food if you insist" Joel Fuhrman.
When are you LCHFers going to deal with reality as it is, not as you want it to be?
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