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More fun facts about Ancel Keys

I know he has few fans here, but this view of him by a more enlightened medical doctor is well worth sharing.

What Every Doctor Should Know About Ancel Key’s Experiments

The post starts off with a bang with the still-rare point that he was a PhD in oceanography, specializing in eels. Then she starts in on his crimes against science:

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For those of you who aren’t fully convinced that butter and eggs are healthy, I’ve devoted the first half of this article to highlighting why, when your doctor recommends that you swap out saturated fats in foods like butter and eggs for polyunsaturated fat in products like Smart Balance and packaged breakfast cereals, it’s largely thanks to Ancel Keys and his misleading, even dishonest, public statements.

... After Keys made the cover of Time magazine on Jan 13, 1961, the American public was introduced to the idea that saturated fats were clogging their arteries, and that idea ultimately led to a sea change in the foods we eat. Real foods would increasingly replaced by processed, and the era of obesity and chronic disease would begin.
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Keys based his claim that saturated fat increases blood cholesterol on the experiments he’d done. But the experiments were not performed using real foods rich in saturated fat. His experiments used saturated fats that had been artificially created from vegetable oils using a process called hydrogenation. Hydrogenated vegetable oils contain not just saturated fat but also trans fat and a whole host of other unnatural molecules.

That's right! When he said his experiments were done with butter, they were actually done with margarine.

This might be one to print out and take with you to the doctor's office :)

And the Keys hits just keep coming . . . Thanks for the link, Dr. Shanahan provides very good information here, and she is one of the forces in driving better nutritional awareness in the medical field. We need more outspoken, informed experts like her.

Wow..... And I thought cherry picking the 7 countries study data was misleading!

What I never understood with him was what he was trying to prove.

Unless he got a huge royalty from the tobacco industry why did he add cig's to ration packs?
And unless he was getting money from food industry what was he trying tor prove, and was he deliberately misleading people for fun or his own gain?

I then loose the plot with the medical industry for continuing to believe his work, and why oh why did nobody read it for what it was.

What sticks out the most here for me is that people thought it was okay to experiment on people too crazy (or old) to defend themselves, at least by the standard of care of the day.

Yeah, human research ethics didn't even really become a significant concern from what I can recall from college psychology classes until the Milgram experiments starting in 1963 and a book he published about it in 1974. You know, those experiments exploring obedience to authority where research subjects were ordered by an authority figure to harm someone with electric shocks and, at least in the original tests, never debriefed/told it was an actor and no one was hurt. The possible harm from that really got people started thinking about risks of human research and starting up ethics committees and things we have now to protect people. Plus, for the mentally ill up until pretty recently and even now it's still a struggle to overcome some pretty negative social stigmas that caused people not to be treated with a lot of respect.
Unintended pun, considering Ancel Keys studied oceanography and eels?

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that idea ultimately led to a sea change in the foods we eat

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Originally Posted by Zei

Unintended pun, considering Ancel Keys studied oceanography and eels?

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Yes, it was unconscious punning. I use nautical terms a lot for someone without much experience :)

To me, Ancel Keys was a careerist, first and foremost. How does someone get famous as a scientist? By discovering something new. What if you aren't uncovering something new? Make it up.

Here was reams of data because of all the upheaval in Europe during WWII, and he had so much fame and connections already because of the K ration thing & such. He built this huge tower of false data, dragging along a lot of other people whose careers needed the CYA and who bolstered him for their own selfish reasons.

And I maintain it was an attractive theory to a lot of people, especially in the USA, for bizarre emotional reasons that support veganism today. Red meat, butter, and other "rich foods" has an indulgent patina, a expensive aura of hedonism; with the US long Puritan, anti-life, tradition, it "just made sense" to people that eating "virtuously" would be good for a person.

Medicine doesn't taste good, so food shouldn't either!

I share your theory about Ancel Keys' motives, WereBear. And once people like him are known for something, they defend that position no matter what, same as Ornish and CSPI.

Hmm, fairly sad that an oceanographer should be responsible for such a "sea change" in our diet. But what I have not quite grasped is why should an eel man be doing research on human diet and nutrition in the first place?