Presidential Hearts
When President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a “mild” heart attack while golfing in 1955, the nation’s medical community got busy investigating heart disease as a newfound, growing threat to public health. The White House press office, mindful of the disastrous public relations after Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in office, admitted the problem early on while Eisenhower recovered in the hospital.
Heart attacks and heart disease were on the increase at the time, as heart disease took over from war as a major cause of mortality. While the fact of Eisenhower’s three- to four-pack-a-day smoking habit was not overlooked as contributory, tobacco had not yet been made into the central villain of public health. Instead, the incident elevated a theory that heart disease originated from a bad, high-fat diet. The most prominent health expert was Ancel Keys, a research epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. His favored theory was that heart disease was caused by too much fat in the diet, and this theory ascended the ladder of public consciousness to become the low-fat diet recommendations still pedaled by the American health care system today.
The diet-heart hypothesis, as it is known, was based on a single cherry-picked international epidemiological study, and little else. But Keys’s forceful personality and easy press accessibility gave the low-fat recommendation the edge. To avoid heart disease of the sort suffered by Eisenhower, the public was advised to stop eating fatty red meats, butter, full-fat dairy products, and any other saturated fats—ones that are solid at room temperature—including those found in nuts. Instead, margarine, vegetable (seed) oils, and hydrogenated vegetable oils like Crisco shortening would be the healthy choices. (When the hydrogenated vegetable oils were finally studied in depth earlier this century, their abysmal health effects led to their immediate removal as an ingredient in most processed foods, after the public health system had spent decades endorsing them as the healthy choice—which should have served as a humbling embarrassment, but didn’t.)
A competing theory about the origins of heart disease was disfavored and suppressed: that it was the diet high in industrial seed oils, sugar, and carbohydrates that was the real public health menace. Researchers and academics who preferred the alternative found their careers curtailed while their work lost funding and went unpublished. Sometimes the pursuit of scientific truth involves interpersonal contests of power in which rivals are dispatched firmly.
When science journalist Gary Taubes published his monumental bestseller Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), he merely brought a longstanding scientific argument into public view, reviving the criticism that public policy had been promoting a theory with almost no replicable scientific research to support it.
What was lost while the government and other public health authorities followed the low-fat-diet theory? That would be hard to say exactly, but proponents of the high-fat diet alternative argue that several “epidemics” of chronic illness have been the result: obesity, heart disease, type II diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, metabolic syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, many cancers, Alzheimer’s, and many more. While subsequent research has not conclusively settled the dispute, it has shown the central ingredient in highly processed foods—sugar—to be both unhealthy and highly addictive.
It is, of course, also possible that neither of the two theories are completely right, but merely play a role alongside other causes that have yet to be identified. Our biology is complex. Our environment—manmade or natural—is complex. Despite a popular sense that we know so much about everything, we still struggle against collective ignorance as our species always has. We may get closer and closer to truth as time goes on, but we also pursue wrong ideas with the dogged determination of people taken in by their own confirmation biases. This blog is no less likely to succumb to such delusions.
Nonetheless, pursue them we do, for now at least, having experienced personal benefit from a very low-carb diet—even while it is still denounced by most of the quasi-official healthcare system.
I can hack the twits well enough to catch a post from Jonah, which I was more than half expecting: "For reasons that will make a good story later (perhaps much later) there will be neither a G-File nor a solo remnant this week. My apologies."
I trust they are having a good time in Europe, good stories later notwithstanding. There are also photos up of the dogs having a good time, which is important because it allows the Goldbergs to have a good time.
PS: we were supposed to have severe thunderstorms overnight, but, I did not, though Bill did...today there are some grey clouds lurking about, but, the aren't raining and it is relatively cool ( mid to upper 70's)