Note to my readers: this is the first part of a multi-part blog series addressing the question of fats, cholesterol, statins and preventing heart disease.  Many of you have asked this question and I’ve found it difficult to provide brief answers.  I’ve tried to keep my long answers not too long and I’ve broken it down to a multi-part series. 

The history of “bad” cholesterol:

For the past 40 plus years the American Heart Association has been the leading association responsible for advising mainstream medicine to prescribe medications to suppress “bad” cholesterol.  Physicians have been advising their patients that cholesterol has both good and bad cholesterol and the bad particles are responsible for heart disease. To date, television commercials flood the nation’s households with drugs that will suppress the bad cholesterol in an effort to prevent heart disease. Yet multiple studies have surfaced recently showing that there is no such thing as “bad” cholesterol and that cholesterol in its truest form does not cause heart disease. In addition, the epidemiology of increased obesity, diabetes and chronic illness in the past 40 years may be a result of the thinking that “bad” cholesterol causes heart disease. So where did we get this thinking process?

The war on fat began with one man. In 1961 a researcher by the name of Ancel Keys convinced the American Heart Association the ideal that saturated fats caused so-called “bad” cholesterol and that “bad” cholesterol caused heart disease. Ancel Keys asserted this conclusion based on his study referred to as the Seven Countries study. In it Ancel studied 22 groups in different countries and reported that seven of these groups showed a correlation (an association) between saturated fats and heart disease. His findings in his Seven Countries Study concluded that based on this association that heart disease is in fact caused by saturated fat.

The initial problem with his research was that a correlation does not represent cause and affect. It would be like saying that because the sun rises when I wake up I therefore cause the sun to rise.   Yet the faults with Ancel Keys study doesn’t end there. Researchers are revealing that Ancel Keys presented the correlation results of his study to a room full of doctors and was nearly laughed out of the room. Out of frustration he fudged his results, cherry-picked his control group by targeting countries that would meet his hypothesis (but avoiding countries like France-where the diet is rich in fat but heart disease is rare), gave his control group margarine (not a true saturated fat such as butter), and reported his findings deep in a German medical journal. The influential Ancel convinced the American Heart Association that his hypothesis was indeed true: fat clogs arteries and clogged arteries caused heart disease. In 1961 The American Heart Association adopted Ancel’s findings as policy and for the first time ever issued the country’s first-ever guidelines targeting saturated fat.

For the past 40 plus years Americans have been urged by medical professionals to reduce their fat intake. By reducing fat intake American’s replaced their fats with refined flours and sugar. An excess of refined carbohydrates creates insulin resistance and insulin resistance is directly related to diabetes.  And as a result we have a population of ever-increasing rates in obesity, diabetes and chronic disease. It’s estimated by the Center of Disease Control that 1 in 5 children are obese, a determinant that may prevent them to outlive their parents.  Coincidentally diabetes increases the risk for heart disease by 200%. This means that current standards discourage fat intake and increase carbohydrate intake thus increasing the risk of diabetes and ultimately the risk of heart disease. Allow me to repeat: low fat creates insulin resistance which leads to diabetes and diabetes increases risk of heart disease.   The falsifying research of Ancel Keys has led Americans astray, making us sicker than ever. 

Next blog will discuss the true culprit increasing the risk of heart disease. 

In the meantime, be well,

Lynn