A Study That Could Have Changed the American Diet

A 40-year-old study on saturated fat went missing in a dusty basement. The findings could have reshaped the American diet.

Several years ago, Christopher E. Ramsden, a medical investigator at the National Institutes of Health, learned about the long-overlooked study. Intrigued, he contacted the University of Minnesota in hopes of reviewing the unpublished data. Dr. Frantz, who died in 2009, had been a prominent scientist at the university, where he studied the link between saturated fat and heart disease. One of his closest colleagues was Ancel Keys, an influential scientist whose research in the 1950s helped establish saturated fat as public health enemy No. 1, prompting the federal government to recommend low-fat diets to the entire nation.

“My father definitely believed in reducing saturated fats, and I grew up that way,” said Dr. Robert Frantz, the lead researcher’s son and a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic. “We followed a relatively low-fat diet at home, and on Sundays or special occasions, we’d have bacon and eggs.”

The younger Dr. Frantz made three trips to the family home, finally discovering the dusty box marked “Minnesota Coronary Survey,” in his father’s basement. He turned it over to Dr. Ramsden for analysis.

The results were a surprise. Participants who ate a diet low in saturated fat and enriched with corn oil reduced their cholesterol by an average of 14 percent, compared with a change of just 1 percent in the control group. But the low-saturated fat diet did not reduce mortality. In fact, the study found that the greater the drop in cholesterol, the higher the risk of death during the trial.

Source: NY Times