Do Not Take It On The Saturated Fats, It was Keys !
Nowadays great deals of evidences suggest that saturated fats have been wrongly take the blame for causing Coronary Heart Disease (CHD).
The real culprit is the hydrogenated fats and sugar which cause the chronic inflammation in the arteries. Despite the popular belief among the health care providers and even the public, the conceptual belief that saturated fats are clogging the arteries leading to heart diseases is just wrong. A systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies done by Dr. Aseem Malhotra, of Lister Hospital in Stevenage, U.K. and his team shows no associations between the increased consumption of saturated fats and the increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, or diabetes. The studies also show no affect of reducing consumption of saturated on the reduction of the risk of the cardiovascular diseases.
Where all the fuzz started?
the hypothesis that saturated fats cause (CHD) started in the early 1950s by Ancel Benjamin Keys. As a biologist and pathologist, he begin the implication that cholesterol may contribute to Coronary Heart Diseases through a simple logic that white waxy material are blocking the arteries leading to narrow them down. In addition, the fact that older people with high serum cholesterol level got xanthomas, especially in in their eyelids during 1940s, led him and the other researchers to assure that high serum cholesterol might contribute to (CHD). They based their conclusions on the idea that the visible accumulation of cholesterol outside the arteries (eyelids) must be just like invisible ones building up inside of the arterial walls.
However, it was Keys himself who discredited his theory when he found that no matter how much cholesterol the fed the volunteers during his experiments, the cholesterol level was the same. He found out he had fed them around 3,000 mg per day (a single large egg has just under 200 mg) and the effect was "trivial". Although, his conclusion was confirmed, he decided that "this point requires no further consideration" at the time people where thrived to find answers for their questions and explanation for the epidemic of the Coronary Heart Diseases.
Why such claims are died!
Since the early twenties when researchers realized the importance of avoiding the bias on the part of the investigators by selecting random subjects to confirm a hypothesis, Keys claims came out to be false. Some highlights made the researchers question his conclusions:
Key's selections criteria could not be called random, he choses places where he conducted his studies that would not offer more challenge to his ideas and ready to accept his conclusion.
Key's conclusion that Greek farmers, part of his subjects in the study, were eating roughly a great deal of fats which he claimed lead to heart attack, was falsely made because he omit that the type of fat the mattered.
Key's main focus was on saturated fats and forget to include other factors could contribute to heart diseases such "Sweets" as Alessandro Menotti, an Italian researcher who went back to key's study twenty-five years later. He noticed an interesting fact that the category of food that correlated to the heart diseases and the high rate of mortality was "sweet" by meaning the sugar
Another point that Key's published his findings in a letter not an article (which would have been peer-reviewed by other scientists), so his calculation could not be checked.
If you are more interested, I highly recommend reading The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz the book goes through the history of formed phenomenon!
Comments