https://rogermarjoribanks.info/global-warming-great-20th-century-fat-scare/ Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:45:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.41 https://rogermarjoribanks.info/global-warming-great-20th-century-fat-scare/#comment-172 Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:54:42 +0000 http://rogermarjoribanks.info/?p=1037#comment-172 […] Example 2: Beginning in the late 1940s, an overwhelming consensus developed among medical scientists that fat-rich diets caused coronary heart disease. Known as Lipophobia, this meme lasted 50 years, causing untold harm for many but a good living for those who promoted the scare. The meme finally collapsed around the millennium when the results of heroic clinical trials became a… […]

]]> https://rogermarjoribanks.info/global-warming-great-20th-century-fat-scare/#comment-169 Thu, 06 Nov 2025 01:54:49 +0000 http://rogermarjoribanks.info/?p=1037#comment-169 […] In in the late 1940s, it was noticed that there was a noticeable rise in the number of people (mostly men) dying from coronary heart disease or CHD. A few sensible scientists pointed out that CHD was strongly age- related and the rise simply a reflection of increased longevity (i.e. good news, we are living longer). But scientists often scorn simple explanations in favour of explanations from the fields of esoteric knowledge that they have spent long years acquiring. Dr Ansel Keys (Professor of Physiology at the U. of Minnesota) and cardiologist Dr Paul Dudley White (the Head of the American Heart Association, AHA) called the rise an epidemic and laid the blame solely at overconsumption of fat (meat, dairy, eggs) in our diet. Using United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) data, Keyes in 1953 published (10) a graph showing a compelling linear correlation between dietary fat consumption and deaths from CHD in six countries (USA, Canada, UK, Italy, Australia & Japan). But the paper was a piece of egregious scientific finagling. If Keys had used the full data set available from the FAO (22 countries) there would have been no correlation. Before plotting his graph, Keys had simply omitted the data that he found inconvenient to his story (see footnote 11). But the critique was too late. The fat/CHD meme had escaped like a virus from a Wuhan Lab and spread around the world. The idea rapidly became near unanimous scientific opinion. In the 1980s, a survey showed that 98.9% of “nutritionary scientists” supported the dietary fat/CHD connection. THE SCIENCE was settled. Ansel Keys made the cover of Time Magazine in 1964: the income of the AHA soared from $1.5 million in 1949 to $26 million 12 years later. The few dissenting scientists (presumably from the 1.1% minority in the survey) were cancelled or fired. The Mathew Effect in operation. But eventually – it took 50 years – heroic clinical trials involving hundreds of thousands of people tracked over periods of up to 40 years, showed no evidence that dietary fat causes CHD. Major data reviews (meta-analyses) by Cochrane Collaboration (the gold standard in epidemiological reviews) in 2000, 2001, 2004 2007 and 2012 concluded: “there are no clear effects of dietary fat changes in total cardiovascular events” (12). The scare was over, good science had driven out the bad, but the harm it caused lives on to this day.  It has been suggested that the present surge in obesity and Diabetes disease is the direct result of the “great diet shift” on the late 20th century, where whole populations switched from meat and dairy to diets high in carbohydrate. For more information on the fat scare of the latter part of the 20th century go to my blog post HERE. […]

]]> https://rogermarjoribanks.info/global-warming-great-20th-century-fat-scare/#comment-104 Mon, 26 Apr 2021 23:24:22 +0000 http://rogermarjoribanks.info/?p=1037#comment-104 […] (2) For a detailed description of the birth, life and death of the great fat phobia of the latter half of the 20th Century, see my earlier post:   Fear of Fat […]

]]>