in 1953 to study the low rates of heart disease around the Mediterranean. According to Teicholz, after measuring serum
cholesterol and performing electrocardiographs on a small sample of men, he concluded that the general population in these cities did, indeed, have rates of heart disease far lower than those typically found in the U.S. More broadly, Keys speculated that because rates of coronary mortality varied so much by coun- try, the disease could not be attributed to genetics, or even the natural process of aging. The plaque-riddled state of American arteries was
“dominated by the long-time effects of a rich, fatty diet and innumerable fat-loading meals,” said Keys in 1957. As proof, he pointed to the young Finnish loggers, who snacked on “slabs of cheese the size of a slice of bread on which they smeared butter … and they washed it down with beer.” “By the mid-1950s, Keys was beginning to back
away from his idea that total fat was the principal cause of heart disease,” said Teicholz. “Instead, his papers start talking more about the type of dietary fat as the critical factor in raising cholesterol. Keys came to this conclusion after conducting a few small, short-term experiments on schizophrenic patients at a Minnesota hospital in 1957 and 1958. He found that serum cholesterol would go up after the men ate saturated fat and down after they consumed vegetable oil. “Thus, as Keys announced in a cluster of papers
in top medical journals in 1957, total serum choles- terol could be reduced by cutting back on saturated fats,” she said. Keys achieved 3 signifi cant coups in 1961, Teicholz
says, with the American Heart Association (AHA), Time magazine and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He appeared on the cover of Time and his as- sertions were embraced by both the AHA and NIH. “These three groups were the most important actors in the world of nutrition, and as a bias in favor of the diet-heart hypothesis settled in among them, they operated like a tag team, institutionalizing Keys’ ideas and conveying them onward and upward for decades to come.”
Earlier research ignored Teicholz said, “The practice of good science requires that when we observe something that doesn’t fi t a
tscra.org
From left : Nina Teicholz and Richard Thorpe, TSCRA fi rst vice president, of Winters.
hypothesis, these observations need to be reckoned with somehow.” Research from 1906 and later contradicted Keys
research, but was largely ignored, Teicholz said. She explained, “In 1906, Vilhjalmur Stefansson,
the son of Icelandic immigrants to America and a Harvard-trained anthropologist, chose to live with the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic.” Stefansson lived like his hosts. For a year, his diet
was almost exclusively meat and fi sh — caribou, salmon and eggs. It was estimated that 70 to 80 per- cent of the calories in the diet were from fat. Teicholz reported that Stefansson’s hosts preferred
the fat, organs and fattier meats on the animals, giv- ing the lean meats, such as tenderloin, to the dogs. Stefansson witnessed neither obesity nor disease among the Inuit.” “Half a century later, George V. Mann, a doctor and
professor of biochemistry, and his team from Vanderbilt University took a mobile laboratory to Kenya to study the Masai people,” Teicholz continued. “Mann found that the Masai warriors drank 3 to 5 liters of milk daily, usually in 2 meals. When milk ran low in the dry season, they mixed it with cow blood. Not shirking the meat, they ate lamb, goat and beef regularly, and on special occasions or on market days when cattle were killed, they would eat 4 to 10 pounds of fatty beef per person.” A. Gerald Shaper, a South African doctor work-
ing at a university in Uganda, studied the Samburu, a group which had a similar diet. “Blood pressure and weight of the Masai and Samburu peoples were about 50 percent lower than their American coun-
June 2015 The Cattleman 59
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