The demonizing of Ancel Keys - Laying some groundwork.

My friend Seth over at Science of Nutrition blog (check it out!) wrote the following post:  FAT IN THE DIET AND MORTALITY FROM HEART DISEASE: A PLAGIARISTIC NOTE.  I encourage you to go read it, but it is long, so in case you don't have the time at the moment, let me summarize my take away.  It's quite a bit more complicated than this, but he lays out the case that a diverse group of people has essentially plagiarized Gary Taubes (from GCBC) .  

On
the left you have the infamous 6 or 7 countries version from Ancel Keys, on the right you have Yerushalmy & Hilleboe's data superimposed (I believe this is Uffe Ravnskov's version of things, I just hotlinked Seth's image).  This side by side is ubiquitous about the internet and all too often includes something resembling what Gary Taubes wrote in Good Calories, Bad Calories.  

Jacob Yerushalmy, who ran the biostatistics department at the University of California , Berkeley, and Herman Hilleboe, the New York State commissioner of health , coauthored a critique of Keys’s hypothesis , noting that Keys had chosen only six countries for his comparison though data were available for twenty-two countries. When all twenty-two were included in the analysis, the apparent link between fat and heart disease vanished. Keys had noted associations between heart-disease death rates and fat intake, Yerushalmy and Hilleboe pointed out, but they were just that.   {Kindle Loc 713-717}

I included that last line where Seth did not, because ... Oh the irony!!  But that blue bolded statement is the one that has been repeated around the world wide web several times more than the ample sampling in Seth's article.   While the correlation is nowhere near as tight in the graph on the right, Taubes' interpretation that the link "vanished" is an erroneous one.  An error that has been repeated repeatedly.  (I have included some further musings on this phenomenon, Taubes and my experiences to the end of this post so as to stay on point)

Denise Minger wrote an article about Ancel Keys and this topic as well:  The Truth About Ancel Keys: We’ve All Got It Wrong.  Needless to say, this didn't go over quite as well with the wider community as her take down of T.Colin Campbell.   Give it a read too!  For me, the pertinent part to this article is the impression all of this Six-Seven Whatever Countries repetitive finger-pointing has done is foster the erroneous impression that the entire Lipid Heart Hypothesis rests on the flimsiest of correlations that (a) didn't even exist, and (b) was advanced by a dishonest cherry picking scientist who fooled the world with his lies.

What brought on this interest in Ancel Keys?  Well, in addition to mangling the dietary habits of native Hawaiians, in a recent interview (no longer available), Dr. Cate Shanahan put her own spin on where the so-called "low fat lie" came from paraphrased in my tweet which I repeat here.

Ancel Keys was very tall &handsome & kept repeating the low fat lie & eventually even docs started believing in it ~ @drcateshanahan paraph

— Evelyn (@CarbSane) May 1, 2014

Apparently Cate didn't read GCBC, or she would know that Keys was:

“pretty ruthless” and not a likely winner of any “Mr. Congeniality” awards.  {GCBC KL 670}

Hardly going to charm your socks off I'd say!  But Keys' irrelevant looks and temperament aside, these articles and Shanahan's commentary encapsulate one of the ongoing nutritional myths -- That Keys is almost singularly responsible for the Lipid-Heart hypothesis, and that this was based solely on his cherry picked plot.  Furthermore, he -- by force or by charm -- rammed this down the throats of governments and the populace out of blinkered dogmatic belief.    There can be no doubt that Keys was central in advancing the hypothesis.  There can also be no doubt that the 6-or-7 countries had exceedingly little to do with why this hypothesis has endured in varying forms to this day.   All the research from that day forward ... because ... Keys.  Right?

As the title implies, I'm laying some groundwork here, especially in light of the new Big Fat Surprise nonsense from yet another "science" journalist, Nina Teicholz.  

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Asides and such regarding the plagiarism angle:

Seth relates a story wherein his class got caught cheating due to a transcription error in the lecture notes the students shared.  From the other side of the lectern, I can say that there is no easier way to spot cheating than when the original source makes a mistake, because the odds of several students making the exact same mistake sitting in such close proximity is close to nil.   Somewhere in the now few hundred posts deep draft bin here I have a post discussing this phenomenon ... again ... yeah ... Gary Taubes.   I can think of two other topics where this has occurred, various versions of:  (1) you need carbs to store fat and (2) your fat is trapped in fat cells when insulin is even slightly elevated.   The first case is more of a circular referencing where the trail always leads to Taubes, the second is a misappropriation of Taubes' misrepresentation of the works of Yalow and Berson taking the words “only the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency” out of context.

Proper citations should be to the primary source of information.  In the cases Seth lists, there is no citation at all, therefore the term plagiarism applies.   Clearly these are not first-hand independent interpretations by various and several people.  Instead they are second-hand re-phrasings (sometimes verbatim copies) of Taubes' interpretation that fail to credit *their* primary source, which was Gary Taubes.  This is more than a nit pick here folks, there's a reason for this and that is demonstrated aptly by the wrecking ball of human nutritional research that is GCBC.  Taubes makes many "mistakes" that are perpetuated because most do not do the due diligence to read and evaluate the primary information for themselves.

There are several cases of this with popular memes in the IHC.