Chapter 1: The Eisenhower Paradox, Pages 1-5

This topic should really ignite a firestorm. Here we have a very healthy individual, who exercised, was affluent, and in great health. He had no family history of heart disease or obvious risk factors after he quit smoking. He ate a greasy hamburger (with the bun) and then had a heart attack. He had below normal cholesterol right before his heart attack.

Just like Jane Brody, he began his low fat diet and his cholesterol only got worse and his condition got worse. He cut his calories very low and he exercised regularly. He changed to corn oil, renouncing butter, margarine, and lard. He was miserable. It was ironic that Ancel Keys appeared in Time Magazine just as Eisenhower’s cholesterol hit 259.

Another case is that of Alberto Salazar, who was one of America’s greatest distance runners. He had a family history of heart disease, but his great fitness and exercise could not overcome heart disease. He was on medication to lower his cholesterol prior to his heart attack. Read his story in Runner’s World, two months ago.

We understand that President Eisenhower, Jane Brody’s, and Alberto Salazar’s cases are anecdotal, the experiences of individuals. However, it’s absolutely unclear whether these low fat diets had any effect on their lives, but they certainly did not lower their cholesterol. In Salazar’s case, his medication did lower his cholesterol. As Mike Eades has reported recently, statin drugs do work in that they lower cholesterol. However, it is very debatable as to the mechanism they use to stop heart attacks. It's becoming clear that they slow oxidation and stress which thereby stop the heart attacks.

Here’s the rub. Is there any proof that cholesterol even needs to be lowered?

According to Dr. Ravnskov, reporting for Weston Price, people with cholesterol live the longest! Dr. Harlan Krumholz of Yale Cardiovascular Medicine reported in 1994, that old people with cholesterol died twice as often from a heart attack as did old people with high cholesterol. See JAMA 272, 1335-1340, 1990.

Cholesterol seems to be protective against infectious diseases.

Even though President Eisenhower’s experience was anecdotal, many studies have found that low cholesterol is in certain respects worse than high cholesterol. For instance, in 19 large studies of more than 68,000 deaths, reviewed by Professor David R. Jacobs and his co-workers from the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, low cholesterol predicted an increased risk of dying form gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases. The argument may be that the infection caused the cholesterol to go down; however the findings were that the individuals already had low cholesterol before being exposed to the infections.

Chapter 1: The Diet-Heart Hypothesis – Pages 5-9

The diet-heart hypothesis began as a scientific debate. It took thirty years for the world to follow because researchers found the evidence ambiguous.

From 1950, supporters argued their hypothesis on the basis of strong beliefs, not evidence. Two major myths provided the foundation:

1. Paul Dudley White’s declaration that a “great epidemic” of heart disease had ravaged the country since World War II; and
2. The “changing American Diet.” (Subject of tomorrow’s discussion)

The facts simply did not support these claims.

Did the increasing awareness of heart disease coincide with an epidemic or did we develop better technology for diagnosis?

James Herrick used the newly invented EKG in 1918 to augment his diagnosis of heart disease and then his work was taken seriously. Between 1920 and 1930, diagnoses of heart disease increased 400 percent.

During the 1950’s, premature deaths and infectious diseases and nutritional deficiencies had been all but eliminated in the U.S., due to the discovery of antibiotics which left more Americans living long enough to die of chronic diseases. Even in Great Britain, the number of persons over 65 more than doubled between 1900 and 1937. The heart attack deaths doubled with them.

The other factor was the difficulty of classifying a death as heart disease. Most of us probably have atherosclerotic lesions at this moment, although we never feel the symptoms. Confronted with the remains of such a person, examiners would likely write “sudden death” on a death certificate. The American Heart Association acknowledged these difficulties in a report in 1957.

The proportion of deaths classified under “diseases of the heart” has been declining steadily since the late 1940s, contrary to public perception. The World Health Organization stated that “much of the apparent increase in coronary heart disease mortality may simply be due to improvements in the quality of certification and accurate diagnosis.”

In 1948, the American Heart Association went on the offensive by massively publicizing the disease as the number one killer of Americans. They employed newspapers, magazines, celebrities, fund raisers, you name it. Ironically, over the years compelling arguments against a heart-disease epidemic like the 1957 AHA report has been repeatedly published in medical journals. As David Kritchevsky observed, such articles are called “unobserved publications.” “They don’t fit the dogma so they get ignored and are never cited.”

Chapter I: The Changing American Diet – Pages 9-13

The second myth that provides the foundation for the Diet-Heart Hypothesis is the “changing American diet.”

In 1953, Ancel Keys wrote: “The present level of fat in the American diet did not always prevail and this fact may not be unrelated to the indication that coronary heart disease is increasing in this country.”

In 1973, George McGovern wrote Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the first “food pyramid.” He wrote “the simple fact is that our diets have changed radically within the last fifty years with great and often very harmful effects on our health.”

New York Times writer Jane Brody wrote the best-seller, the Good Food Book where she said, “within this century, the diet of the average American has undergone a radical shift away from plant-based foods such as grains, beans and peas, nuts, potatoes, and other vegetables and fruits and toward foods derived from animals, meat, fish, poultry, eggs, and dairy products.”

Basically, it was our over-consumption of meat and fat which brought us to the epidemic of heart disease.

The argument was based on Department of Agriculture statistics which suggested that we were eating 25 percent more starches and cereals, 25 percent less fats and 20 percent less meat than we did in the 1950s and later.

These statistics were based on “food disappearance data” that roughly estimates (guesses) how much we ate of any particular food each year. The USDA began compiling this data in the 1920s. With the advent of World War II, they began to use the limited data available to compile statistics going back to 1909. David Call, a former dean of Cornell University College of Agriculture said that “the data is lousy and you can prove anything you want to prove.”

However, historians of both British and American dietary habits have observed that we were traditionally a nation of meat-eaters, suspicious of vegetables and expecting meat three to four times a day. We certainly saw this from Banting’s menus. The Frenchman, Harvey Levenstein, estimated that Americans consumed eight times as much meat as bread.

That same USDA data that claimed we used to eat more cereal, claimed that the average American was eating 178 pounds of meat annually in the 1830s, forty to sixty pounds more than was reportedly being eaten 100 years earlier. This observation was documented in a book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, where the author chronicles the menus of her impoverished neighbor who enjoyed beefsteaks and onions for breakfast, dinner and supper. What a wonderful existence! I’ll bet that entire family was lean and beautiful.

During the time we were supposedly living on grains, flour and potatoes, corn was still considered feed for livestock. Pasta was popularly known as macaroni and was considered typical Italian food. Rice was considered to be an exotic food imported from the Far East.

Did we come to eat less meat from 1910 to 1919? If we did it’s because we doubled our population between 1880 and 1910 and the livestock production couldn’t keep up. The Federal Trade Commission noted that “meat consumption per capita in the U.S. has been declining.” I’ll bet it got more expensive!

In 1906, there was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a fictional expose on the meatpacking industry. According to the 1976 publication, Eating in America, that book caused meat sales in the U.S. to drop by half. Packers were still trying to woo their customers back as late as 1928. The meat packers attempted their own “Eat More Meat” campaign and it failed.

This suggests that the supposed gain-dominated American diet of 1909 may have been a deviation from the norm, if it happened at all.

The same USDA data that was used to support the “changing American diet” theory also shows that during the decades of the “heart-disease epidemic” we also dramatically increased our vegetable consumption – we doubled it!

Nutritionist began to tell us that we needed vitamins from fruits and green vegetables that were conspicuously lacking in our diets in the nineteenth century.
As University of Kansas professor Clendenning wrote in his book The Balanced Diet in 1936, “the preponderance of meat and farinaceous foods on my grandfather’s table over fresh vegetables and fruits would be most unwelcome to modern palates. I doubt he ever ate an orange. I know he never ate grapefruit, broccoli, cantaloupe or asparagus……

From the end of World War II, the USDA statistics became more reliable and we cut whole milk and cream by half. We ate less lard, butter and animal fat (including the fat in meat, eggs and dairy). We ate more margarine, vegetable shortening, salad and cooking oils. All of this good eating paralleled the epidemic of heart disease.

I can certainly recount the change in my own life. When I was young, I ate oatmeal with butter and sugar practically every day for breakfast. I ate school lunch, and I had meat and potatoes for dinner. When I got married, I ate far less meat and more salads, breads and grains. We ate low fat everything. Once I got fat, I cut down on the calories and changed the breads and grains to the brown stuff. It was the worse-tasting stuff ever and I was constantly hungry and dreaming of food, but I lost weight. This is when I started snacking. I never was much for snacks until I cut my calories, then I was always looking for something sweet. I went low carb, I restricted the green stuff to fewer than 25 grams, I ate all the fatty meat I could stand and got it together.

If you were trim when you were in high school and college what was the big change in your diet that made you fat?

The person in this article
is trying to convince the reader that the immigrant’s problem in coming to the U.S. is that they eat more meat and therefore their health declines. The problem is, they also chronicle that the person has began to eat good ol’ American junk food. They acknowledge that this is a problem, but they are trying to equate junk food and meat consumption as being harmful to their health. They even want to educate the immigrant about making better choices at a grocery store. What, the poor immigrant has never seen meat before?

GCBC Chapter I: Cholesterol and Ancel Keys Pages 13-19

Jeremiah Stamler, a Chicago Cardiologist was one of the most outspoken proponents of the Diet-Heart hypothesis. He referred to cholesterol as the “medical villain.” This conclusion was hypothetical at best.

Cholesterol is a pearly-white fatty substance that can be found in all body tissues. It is an essential component of cell membranes and a constituent of a range of physiological processes, including the metabolism of sex hormones. Cholesterol is also found in atherosclerotic plaques so it was assumed to be responsible for beginning the disease.

Stamler called it “biological rust” which “spreads to choke off the flow of blood or slow it down just like rust inside a water pipe so that only a dribble comes out of your faucet.” This imagery is so compelling that we still talk and read about artery-clogging fats and cholesterol as though the fat of a greasy hamburger goes directly from your stomach to your artery lining.

Where did this “evidence” to support the cholesterol-hypothesis come from? Rabbits! Yes, you read it properly, from rabbits. In 1913, Russian pathologist Nilolaj Anitschkow reported that he could induce atherosclerotic-type lesions in rabbits by feeding them olive oil and cholesterol. Rabbit are herbivores and they would never eat a high-cholesterol diet. Are you kidding me?

These wonderful people tried to induce lesions and heart attacks in chickens, pigeons, wild sea lions, seals, pigs, cats, dogs, sheep, cattle, horses, reptiles, rats, and baboons on diets that were almost exclusively vegetarian. None of these studies did much to implicate either animal fat or cholesterol!

What kept this cholesterol hypothesis alive? Any physician could measure cholesterol levels in human subjects. However, they couldn’t properly interpret the results, much like today, it seems. There are many variables that influence cholesterol readings such as exercise, weight gain or loss, stress, hormones, diuretics, sedatives, tranquilizers, and alcohol. We’ve never established that patients with atherosclerosis had significantly more cholesterol than those who didn’t. As John Gofman wrote in Science in 1950, “Some works claim a significant elevation in blood cholesterol levels for a majority of patients with atherosclerosis whereas others debate this finding vigorously. Certainly, a tremendous number of people, who suffer from the consequences of atherosclerosis, show blood cholesterols in the accepted normal range.”

If the cholesterol hypothesis is correct then people with very high cholesterol, (above 300) should all get atherosclerosis and die of heart attacks, yet this is not the case. Those who have defective genes and people with certain thyroid and kidney disorders have very high numbers up to as much as 1500; yet these individuals rarely diet of heart attacks.

Who was Ancel Keys? Keys ran the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene at the University of Minnesota. He wanted “to find out why people get sick before they got sick.” He developed the “K” rations which soldiers used during World War II. He did starvation studies on human conscientious objectors. (Note: This 2,000 calorie diet notion largely came from his studies – It’s just about 500 calories above the level where you lose your mind and start hacking off body parts, by the way.) See here: He wrote the book, “The Biology of Human Starvation.”

He wasn’t the best scientist however he was known to have an “indomitable force of will.” He was a relentless defender of his own hypothesis. He minced few words when he disagreed with a competitor’s interpretation of the evidence. In other words, he was one of those guys that were never wrong!

When he launched his crusade against heart disease in the 1940s, most physicians already believed that heart disease was caused by dietary cholesterol. Ironically, Keys was the first to discredit this theory. He fed men for months at a time on diets either high or low in cholesterol and it had very little effect on their blood cholesterol. In this case, most researchers agreed!

However, in 1951 he was told by a physiologist from Naples that heart disease was not a problem in his city. He went there and conducted tests and found that they were indeed heart disease free. He found that rich people had higher cholesterol than the workers and concluded that it was because the rich people ate more fat than the poor people, based on his observations at a single dinner. By 1952, Keys argued that Americans should reduce their fat consumption although he simultaneously acknowledged that “direct evidence on the effect of the diet on human arteriosclerosis is very little and might be for some time.” He was even prophetic!

After many experiments and studies and a trip to Finland, he shared a snack with some loggers consisting of “slabs of cheese smeared with butter washed down with beer.” Some of the loggers had heart attacks so this became his object lesson for the coronary problem.

Keys also observed in a 1950 report from Sweden that heart disease deaths virtually disappeared during World War II, which he attributed to less meat and egg consumption although there was also less consumption of all foods, weight loss and increased physical activity. Any of these things could have been responsible for the disappearance of heart disease, but not to Keys.

Many researchers wouldn’t buy the diet-heart hypothesis. They noted that Keys chose to use seven countries during the famous “Seven Countries Study” when 22 countries’ data was available. If he would have used them all, he would have discovered that there was no dietary fat correlation to heart disease. Keys merely noted an “association, not a cause.”

George Mann, director of the famous Framingham Heart Study called this popular “drawing of associations” within the field of nutrition, “a popular but not very profitable game.” As Taubes notes, the problem is simply stated: We don’t know what other factors might be at work. Associations can be used to fuel speculation and establish hypotheses, but nothing more. “Investigators must remember that evidence which is not inherently sound cannot serve even for partial support. It is worse than useless.”

GCBC Chapter I Wrap-up and Preview to Chapter 2 Pages 19-21

A constant feature of Chapter I was that facts concerning the Diet-Heart hypothesis were divided into two groups: Facts that complicated the message and facts that did not. Of course, the most reliable facts went into the “complicated” group. It was, and it is still less contentious to tell people to worry about the cholesterol in their diets rather the cholesterol in their blood. It was considered too contentious to actually break down which types of fat influence cholesterol levels.

In 1952, Laurance Kinsell, director of the Institute for Metabolic Research at the Highland-Alameda County Hospital in Oakland, CA, demonstrated that vegetable oil will decrease the amount of blood cholesterol and animal fats will raise it. That same year, J.J. Groen of the Netherlands reported that cholesterol levels were independent of the total amount of fat consumed. Cholesterol levels were lowest in his subjects on a high-fat vegetarian diet and highest on a lower fat animal diet. Keys eventually accepted this finding once he reproduced it.

Kinsell and Pete Ahrens of Rockefeller University demonstrated that the crucial factor in controlling cholesterol was not whether the fat was animal or vegetable, but its degree of “saturation.” Saturation is a measure of whether or not the molecules of fat, known as triglycerides, contain what can be considered a full quotient of hydrogen atoms which tend to raise cholesterol. Unsaturated fats tend to lower cholesterol.

Most of us still don’t understand that both animal and vegetable oils contain many different kinds of fat with different degrees of saturation. Half of the fat in beef is unsaturated and the same type found in olive oil. Lard is 60 percent unsaturated and most of chicken fat is unsaturated.

More importantly, it was considered too contentious an issue to determine whether cholesterol was even a relevant factor for heart disease. Keys and his wife measured total cholesterol and compared that with the total amount of fat in the diet, regardless whether that fat was animal or vegetable fat. The recommended solution, of course, was to eat less fat. This was the basis of our present-day low-fat diet despite the fact that since the mid-1950s, researchers have known that the total amount of dietary fat has little effect on cholesterol levels.

In 1957, the American Heart Association opposed Ancel Keys and his diet-heart hypothesis in a fifteen page report for taking “uncompromising stands based on evidence that does not stand under critical examination.” “There is not enough evidence to permit such a rigid stand on what the relationship is between nutrition, particularly the fat content of the diet and atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease.

Less than four years later, the evidence had not changed. However, an ad-hoc committee which included Ancel Keys and Jeremiah Stamler issued a new two and a half page AHA report (with a half page of references, many contradicting the report) that reflected a change of heart. The new report argued that “the best scientific evidence of the time” strongly suggested that Americans would reduce their risk of heart disease by reducing the fat in their diets and replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats.

If this isn’t a case of “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” I don’t know what is!!!!

After this report hit the press, Time Magazine put Keys on the cover as the face of dietary wisdom in America. This article only contained a single paragraph noting that Key’s hypothesis was “still questioned by some researchers with conflicting ideas of what causes coronary disease.”



End of Chapter 1.

Thank you, Charles! I never did make it through the entire discussion on the old forum. My business picked up a very large client and I spent the last 5 months working 90+ hours a week and didn't have much time to devote to this. I did re-read GCBC last week (3rd time) so I will look forward to your chapter breakdowns.

Charles,
It is good to be back. I seem to remember before we lost the forum that you were drafting a response to some position but I can't remember any longer what it was you were responding to. Would you post as to what it was you were going to respond to?

Thank-You, Charles, for starting the GCBC discussions again. I hated that we lost all that valuable information.

You're all very welcome. I am feverishly working on getting these posts back up for you. You'll recall that we did the other posts in 5 parts for each chapter. Now that we've finished the book, I'll be adding an entire chapter at a time, so look for those coming up shortly as I edit them.

When I finish this, I have a refutation to Gary Taubes' book from the leading obesity researchers such as Dr. George Bray and others who were mentioned in the book. They have prepared a refutation and I want to take the opportunity to disect their arguments from the perspective of the research that we have learned. Hopefully I'll have the posts added by the end of the week and then I'll start on that rebuttle. It should be fun!

All of these chapter discussions are open so you can post comments to any part of the book and there are no parts that are off limits. If you have questions, fire away!

Regards,

Charles

THANK YOU Charles! I can't wait to meet you on Sunday.

I was so pleased to see these discussions back online. I had bookmarked them to read and had hoped that they had not been lost forever. Thanks for all of the work that you have put into these most interesting discussions. I want to read them all and then reread the book.

mmcaniac Wrote:I was so pleased to see these discussions back online. I had bookmarked them to read and had hoped that they had not been lost forever. Thanks for all of the work that you have put into these most interesting discussions. I want to read them all and then reread the book.

You're welcome. Hopefully, I'll have the rest of them up tomorrow.

Charles,
My biggest regret when Jimmy's forum was hacked and went down was that i had read everything you had writtin on GCBC, but I had put off thanking you for all of your hard work. Your analysis and wirtten summaries were impressive and (usually) easy to follow. The hours it takes to just read a book that dense and complicated is dwarfed by the time you must have spent studying it and than writing and writing. Your intelligence and compassion for others that this effort shows is inspiring. Thank you so much.

Evainemage1 Wrote:Charles,
My biggest regret when Jimmy's forum was hacked and went down was that i had read everything you had writtin on GCBC, but I had put off thanking you for all of your hard work. Your analysis and wirtten summaries were impressive and (usually) easy to follow. The hours it takes to just read a book that dense and complicated is dwarfed by the time you must have spent studying it and than writing and writing. Your intelligence and compassion for others that this effort shows is inspiring. Thank you so much.

You're very welcome. That means a lot so thanks for the kind words. For me, it was a life-changing experience and I'm actually thankful to all of you for providing an opportunity for me to really get in and learn that book. It's really worth the time investiment!

I'm new to this site so I didn't see your earlier efforts but I do thank you for all this work. My GCBC has been loaned out continuously since I finished it and many times I have wanted to refresh my memory. Now I will come here! It was a life changing read. And I was angry when I finished it. Angry about all the years of misinformation that lead to health problems. My family and I have been eating very low carb since October 15th, 2007 and there have been health improvements and weight loss. This is our WOL now and I'm grateful that Taubes wrote the book.

I am over half way through this book and it makes me angry, also, but I have known this for along time (the lies of the medical people). I have low carbed for years. It does me a great deal of good, however, to hear of the various studies, etc. that HAVE proven what we know to be true. Refined stuff, white, processed stuff, etc. is killing us and making us fat! I use fitday and stick to low carb and feel SO much better. I added back some "good" things not long ago (oatmeal, apples, sweet potatoes, etc) and up went the weight so I am back to strict LC and taking off the 10# or so I gained. Live and Learn! The world is SO brainwashed it will take ions of time to get society back on the right track and the medical community has not even really started! I was impressed to hear Whoopie Goldberg make a statement about "corn syrup being evil and in everything" and I thought BINGO!! At last.... someone else is noticing!!

Welcome, Viv and Mel. It's great to have you here. If I can be of any help to you on your journey, don't hesitate to ask!

Best regards,

Charles

Wow Charles great work in reviewing this book - I have it on order from Amazon - coudln't find at my local book shop here in Sydney - that is pretty typical here. I was so impressed watching the video of a talk Garry Taubes gave - Jimmy has on his site that I just had to get the book. If it wasn't for Jimmy site I would never have heard of it.
To date I have inspired two people to go on low carb and they are now complete converts - also I know a doctor and his wife who are on low carb and getting great results. Anyone who cares to listen I will tell about this - I am now walking proof that it works and everyone is noticing too how healhy I look too. Lets hope this book reaches more people
cheers
Helena

Helena Wrote:Wow Charles great work in reviewing this book - I have it on order from Amazon -

Thanks for the kind words. This is exactly what it's going to take -- a grass roots demonstration featuring lean, strong, healthy people. This will get the questions started and we'll tell them. We won't likely win this war with words. People ask me all the time, how did you do it? All I can say is give it a try. People like you are living proof that it works.

Regards,

Charles

If I could find a doctor that low cared and understood the reasons behind it I would switch in a minute. As it is, I rarely go because they want you to "low fat" for everything!! When I stick to low carb all the tests are great, anyway. When I did Kimkins (silly me!) the weight fell off, but the cholesterol shot up higher than it had ever been. In effect my liver was making it's own fats!!

Yes Charles I do agree it will be grass roots that turn this around. At times I get angry at the rubbish advice that has been given out and the suffering that it has caused - I am just so glad I found out in time

Viv that seems like the body fighting back to survive. I am finding that each week that goes by I feel better and better and it is not only my body there has also been a complete change in the way I feel emotionally - which is very positive and happy - I had suffered for years with low level depression - it has now completely gone. So days I think when have I felt this good and the answer comes back when I was a kid ! I now feel truly blessed

Helena Wrote:Yes Charles I do agree it will be grass roots that turn this around. At times I get angry at the rubbish advice that has been given out and the suffering that it has caused - I am just so glad I found out in time

Viv that seems like the body fighting back to survive. I am finding that each week that goes by I feel better and better and it is not only my body there has also been a complete change in the way I feel emotionally - which is very positive and happy - I had suffered for years with low level depression - it has now completely gone. So days I think when have I felt this good and the answer comes back when I was a kid ! I now feel truly blessed

We ARE blessed to know what we do about this WOE!!

Viv Wrote:If I could find a doctor that low cared and understood the reasons behind it I would switch in a minute. As it is, I rarely go because they want you to "low fat" for everything!! When I stick to low carb all the tests are great, anyway. When I did Kimkins (silly me!) the weight fell off, but the cholesterol shot up higher than it had ever been. In effect my liver was making it's own fats!!

The cholesterol issue was addressed in the book. This is very NORMAL. Fat molecules have cholesterol in them and as they begin to dissolve the excess cholesterol enters the bloodstream and makes your serum cholesterol reading go up. As you continue your body will get rid of the excess and the readings will normalize. Just keep eating properly and things will clear up.

No, Charles, reread the post! LOL! When I ate LOW FAT my cholesterol shot up!! On low carb it is just fine!!! It did go up when I first started and the Dr said "eat low fat" and handed me a sheet with a low fat diet on it. I came home and pitched it in the trash!! Dr Atkins was light years ahead of other doctors and I wish they would catch up. I'm an RN and I understand the physiology behind it all(even if I can't spell it!) so why don't the doctors? GT book goes through study after study.... all showing we are on the right path. Why do they refuse to believe? Just today someone told me their step dad had been on Atkins for 3 years and he was 65 and looked 95. She said "he just won't eat vegetables!" I politely said, "then he isn't doing it right and needs to re-read the book!" I had roast chicken and asparagus for dinner...... YUM! I eat more veggie now than ever before...