Dr George V. Mann

Dr. George Mann, called the Diet-Cholesterol-Heart hypothesis, "the greatest scam in the history of medicine."

Remember George Mann did 400 electro-cardiograms of Maasai warriors, who had very high cholesterol levels but no heart disease.

Mann got a grant from the National Institute of Health to do a small study based on 1000 people. He claimed in that study, to have proof that the recommended diet was a nonsense, but the NIH, refused him permission to publish.

That was the end of his career, the first of many to suffer from challenging the paradigm.

Key Unproven Assumptions

Dietary fat is fattening and damages the arteries to the heart. Saturated fat is “bad fat.”

High cholesterol is a cause of arterial disease and polyunsaturated oils are “good fat.”

Carbohydrates are the lowest cost calories and there are no damaging health implications from eating a high carbohydrate diet.

Carbohydrates are essential for healthy brain function.

We can clearly state that all those assumption are false.

The Standard American Diet - A New Paradigm

Unexpectedly strong support.

Those who accepted the paradigm did well.

Those who opposed the new thinking lost support and their careers ended.

It became a gravy train for doctors, hospitals, researchers in many disciplines.

If you follow the money the failure of Standard American Diet as a health measure is new opportunity for researchers, physicians, the pharmaceutical industry, and industrial food producers.

As science it was always null and void. Many eminent people said so at the time, but they were over-ridden.

At the time, nutritional science was disjointed and weak. Medical science was too dependent on epidemiologists, who had little medical training and no scientific training.

The power of politics and smell of new government money was underestimated. Food producers and the pharmaceutical companies now had an opportunity to make a lot of money.

There were no real restrictions on food producers. They had to make their food "safe" which meant hygienic and non-poisonous, and it should be "low fat." They couldn't make false claims on the packaging. The production of long life, shelf-stable carbohydrate foods became very profitable.

The failure of the diet to make the population more healthy, enlarged the opportunity for pharmaceutical companies and researchers, because there was now a host of targets for new drugs and medical procedures.

Disruptive Paradigm - The Banting Diet.

If it's true that the Banting or ketogenic diet resolves obesity, reverses type 2 diabetes and makes type one diabetes easily manageable, if metabolic syndrome can be minimised and if inflammation is much less serious, public health will significantly improve.

But there's a downside. Many companies stand to lose considerable sales. Much established research would need to stop. Many prestigious positions in medicine and research would be terminated. Many committees on diabetes and heart disease would be shown-up to be only paper tigers.