What if bad fat isn't so bad?, p2

(1)

Add Your Vote

declining, the number of deaths due to heart disease was steadily climbing. And to explain why, he presented a comparison of fat intake and heart disease mortality in six countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Italy, and Japan.

The Americans ate the most fat and had the greatest number of deaths from heart disease; the Japanese ate the least fat and had the fewest deaths from heart disease. The other countries fell neatly in between. The higher the fat intake, according to national diet surveys, the higher the rate of heart disease. And vice versa. Keys called this correlation a "remarkable relationship" and began to publicly hypothesize that consumption of fat causes heart disease. This became known as the diet-heart hypothesis.

At the time, plenty of scientists were skeptical of Keys's assertions. One such critic was Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. In a 1957 paper, Yerushalmy pointed out that while data from the six countries Keys examined seemed to support the diet-heart hypothesis, statistics were actually available for 22 countries. And when all 22 were analyzed, the apparent link between fat consumption and heart disease disappeared. For example, the death rate from heart disease in Finland was 24 times that of Mexico, even though fat-consumption rates in the two nations were similar.

The other salient criticism of Keys's study was that he had observed only a correlation between two phenomena, not a clear causative link. So this left open the possibility that something else — unmeasured or unimagined — was leading to heart disease. After all, Americans did eat more fat than the Japanese, but perhaps they also consumed more sugar and white bread, and watched more television.

Despite the apparent flaws in Keys's argument, the diet-heart hypothesis was compelling, and it was soon heavily promoted by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the media.

Tags:

Posted By:

Evmim

10 months, 1 Week, 6 days, 10 hours, 33 minutes ago

News

All Votes: 1

Bookmark

Report abuse

Comments (0) | Who voted on this story (1) | Email this story

UnitedProject.org Inc. (c) 2006-2008 All content published on UnitedProject.org is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to substitute for the advice, diagnosis or treatment provided by your physician or other healthcare professionals. If you think you are experiencing a medical problem or an emergency please contact your physician, local emergency room or call 911. Healthcare benefits and discounts are not insurance and not intended as a substitute for health insurance. Except when other source is cited, all content posted by members is licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain License.

Site last updated 10/05/08 - loaded in 0.0198 seconds