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This is from 2017, but I found it fascinating.

Records Found in Dusty Basement Undermine Decades of Dietary Advice

Quote:

If biology has an Indiana Jones, it is Christopher Ramsden: he specializes in excavating lost studies, particularly those with the potential to challenge mainstream, government-sanctioned health advice.

His latest excavation—made possible by the pack-rat habits of a deceased scientist, the help of the scientist’s sons, and computer technicians who turned punch cards and magnetic tape into formats readable by today’s computers—undercuts a pillar of nutrition science.

Forty years ago, this study got overlooked.

Quote:

Analyzing the reams of old records, Ramsden and his team found, in line with the “diet-heart hypothesis,” that substituting vegetable oils lowered total blood cholesterol levels, by an average of 14 percent.

But that lowered cholesterol did not help people live longer. Instead, the lower cholesterol fell, the higher the risk of dying: 22 percent higher for every 30-point fall. Nor did the corn-oil group have less atherosclerosis or fewer heart attacks.

This was hard data, too: it was conducted in an institution where they knew what people ate over the course of the study.

And just today people (online) were quoting Harvard at me, sticking up for Ancel Keys! of all people. Nothing will convince them.

Quote:

The coleader of the project was Dr. Ancel Keys, author of the Seven Countries Study, Time cover subject, and the most prominent advocate of replacing saturated fat with vegetable fat. “The idea that there might be something adverse about lowering cholesterol [via vegetable oils] was really antithetical to the dogma of the day,” Bob Frantz said.

I hope they live long enough to realize their "faith in authority" was misplaced.