Vegetable Oils Continue to Be Recommended Despite Health Risks

Written by Marina Zhang on June 13, 2023. Posted in Current News

Though research repeatedly shows that vegetable oils, otherwise known as seed oils, are harmful when cooked, dietary guidelines and health organizations continue to promote polyunsaturated vegetable fats over animal fats

Nina Teicholz, an investigative journalist who spent a decade researching fats and oils, gave three major reasons speculating why the recommendation has not changed despite a lack of evidence showing vegetable oils’ alleged benefits and discrepancies indicating possible cancer risks.

1. Bureaucracy Versus Science

The anti-saturated fat nutrition recommendation comes from the late American Heart Association (AHA) researcher and physiologist Ancel Keys’ Diet-Heart Hypothesis, originally put forward in the 1950s.

Keys’ original assumption was that fat, which raised blood cholesterol levels, caused coronary heart disease. He later narrowed the fat type to saturated fat.

While the hypothesis remains unproven, the anti-saturated fat recommendation has transformed over the decades from a diet recommendation to a health dogma and is now a legitimate national policy.

Congressional backing of the diet was the final nail in the coffin, Teicholz argued in her New York Times bestseller, “The Big Fat Surprise.”

The 1977 Dietary Goals for the United States, authored by a Senate select committee, followed the AHA’s guidance to reduce total and saturated fat intake, initializing nationalization of the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet.

Soon after, in 1980, the National Institutes of Health published its first edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Within the document, a whole section was dedicated to reducing cholesterol and fats.

This section took the hypothesis and diet “out of the realm of science and into the world of politics and government,” Teicholz wrote. The move allowed the bureaucracy to legitimize both the hypothesis and the diet.

Bureaucratic powers, however, are antithetical to scientific reasoning, Teicholz wrote.

The core of science, “where skepticism—so essential to good science—can survive,” involves challenging preconceived hypotheses and conclusions to get closer to the truth. Bureaucracies, however, do not necessarily follow this code.

Such is the case with the AHA, the leading researching organization on cardiovascular health. The AHA has recommended against animal fat consumption for nearly half a century. Retracting such a cornerstone recommendation would pose a problem for the AHA, hence why many leading researchers dedicate their lives and careers to finding evidence to support their dogma, Teicholz said.

2. Financial Incentives

A sizeable financial empire spanning the food and pharmaceutical industries has been built on the Diet-Heart Hypothesis. Teicholz said this is a significant reason why many researchers, health organizations, and the industry resist considering that animal fats may not be that harmful.

Vegetable oils have been with the AHA since the association’s rise to prominence. Founded in 1924 at the outset of the coronary heart disease epidemic, the AHA remained a fringe and underfunded research organization for decades.

Then, in 1948, things changed.

“Procter & Gamble (P&G) designated the group to receive all the funds from its ‘Truth or Consequences’ contest on the radio,” Teicholz wrote, citing AHA’s official history. The funds totaled over $1.4 million, equivalent to over $18 million today.

According to the AHA’s official history book, titled “Fighting for Life” by William W. Moore, AHA’s director from 1972 to 1980, P&G executives presented the check at a luncheon, and “suddenly the coffers were filled, and there were funds available for research, public health progress, and development of local groups—all the stuff that dreams are made of!”

It was this check that launched the organization.

P&G was the first company to sell hydrogenated seed oil as food. Its product Crisco was initially made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil.

Today, the AHA has awarded over 120 AHA “heart-checks” to vegetable oil products. These checks are displayed on product labels certifying the AHA has approved them as heart-healthy. While most of these oils are olive, they also include canola, soy, and vegetable.

The only four dairy heart-checks were given to soy milk or a brand of nonfat milk with above-average sugar content (18 grams versus the average 12).

Big Pharma’s Take

Over the decades, the pharmaceutical industry has also made billions of dollars selling drugs that lower LDL cholesterol, deemed “bad cholesterol” and the primary cause of coronary heart disease. Animal fat increases all cholesterol levels, including LDL, while vegetable oils decrease cholesterol levels.

“The biggest blockbuster drug of all time are LDL cholesterol-lowering medications: statins,” Teicholz said. “Saturated fat has to remain the boogeyman because saturated fats tend to raise your LDL cholesterol, so that was always part of the assumption of why saturated fats are bad.”

Funding from pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Merck, and AstraZeneca, made up 3.8 percent of the AHA’s total revenue in 2021–22, a total of nearly $34 million (pdf).

Pfizer, Merck, and AstraZeneca are all major players in the statin industry.

Funding from nonpharmaceutical corporations made up almost 18 percent of AHA’s funding that same year, totaling over $157 million. While the AHA provides the names of all its pharmaceutical benefactors, the organization declined to give names of the other corporations and donation values.

While statins provide marginal benefits for people at high risk of coronary heart events, some doctors argue that their benefits don’t come from lowering LDL cholesterol but are likely due to other functions since some drugs reduce LDL cholesterol but do not show similar clinical benefits.

Many studies have shown that having a high level of blood triglycerides with low HDL cholesterol rather than high LDL cholesterol is a much better indicator of coronary heart disease risk.

Teicholz said that if the focus shifts away from LDL cholesterol and saturated fat, the whole pharmaceutical model on LDL-lowering drugs starts coming apart, like the collapse of a Jenga tower.

3. Egos and Established Notions Are Hard to Challenge

Over half a century, the belief that saturated fat is bad for the heart has become a dogma among doctors and nutritionists. Therefore, arguments that contradict the Keys’ Diet-Heart Hypothesis are met with extreme resistance.

Researchers and journalists who publicly challenge this dogma have been subject to attacks and backlash.

“I’ve been called a ‘wingnut living in my mother’s basement’ by a Yale scientist,” Teicholz told The Epoch Times over a video call.

This response is not new. As far back as the hypothesis’ inception, some researchers whose work challenged Keys’ lost their academic careers. For example, the late Dr. George Mann from Vanderbilt University, a professor and biochemist who challenged the Diet-Heart Hypothesis, told Teicholz that his research path cost him his NIH funding and entrance to reputable journals for publication.

Keys himself openly dismissed and criticized those who put forth other causes for heart disease. While one may interpret Keys’ actions as one of a guilty researcher trying to hide his deceit, Teicholz said she found no evidence of this.

“I think that Ancel Keys, the author of the Diet-Heart Hypothesis, genuinely believed that saturated fats in food was the probable cause … I have no evidence to suggest otherwise,” she said.

The late Professor John Yudkin, a physiologist and nutritionist at the Queen Elizabeth College in the UK, asserted that sugar could lead to heart disease. His hypothesis was ridiculed and marginalized. Keys called Yudkin’s hypothesis “a mountain of nonsense” (pdf), even though, decades later, research indicated that Yudkin’s idea might be very much on the right track.

Mann was also the associate director of the Framingham Heart Study from 1948 to 1955. Initiated in 1948, the large ongoing study investigates epidemiology and risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

During Mann’s time as the associate director of the observational study, researchers found that rather than decreasing coronary heart disease risk, low cholesterol levels were unexpectedly associated with an increase in coronary and total mortality. The study also observed “no relationship” between coronary heart disease and the diet of the participants interviewed.

In 1972, Mann co-authored a study on the African Maasai people who consumed a diet high in meat, milk, and animal blood but had low blood cholesterol and little to no heart disease. However, Mann speculated that exercise could be what protected these people from heart disease.

In his 1977 commentary “Diet-Heart: End of an Era,” Mann lamented the fastidious establishment of Keys’ hypothesis as dogma despite the lack of evidence.

Keys dismissed Mann’s paper in a letter published in 1978, accusing Mann of “deliberately” distorting data and concluding that “Mann often mixes slander with misrepresentation and misquotation in this and other publications.”

The war over nutrition is like a “bumper car version of science,” said Teicholz.

See more here theepochtimes

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