Ancel Keys on Time Magazine

In 1961, physiologist Ancel Keys was on the cover of "TIME magazine." No single person has contributed more to our understanding about diet and health. He led the landmark studies that identified saturated fat as a major cause of heart disease. He was the first to promote the Mediterranean diet. The impact of his work is enormous.

Keys changed the policy of AHA, and eventually the whole world in accordance to his ideas.

Those ideas were never validated by science, but they still dominate our thinking.

The impact on the world has been enormous. Keys was wrong about saturated fats, and associated high cholesterol idea is also faulty.

Adopting the Standard American Diet has been a health disaster that spread world-wide. The evidence for that is in our high rates of metabolic syndrome. Look at our fat cheeks, double chins and bulging waistlines.

Ancel Keys Dethroned

Ancel Keys has been proven wrong about the diet heart hypothesis. First by the Women's Health Initiative, 1998, but not reported until 2006.

And those findings have also been confirmed by two results from the Framingham Heart Study,
1998: "There is no relationship between diet and Cardiovascular disease,"
and in 2007: "There is no relationship between dietary saturated fat and heart disease."

Keys was not right about saturated fats causing heart disease.

However, his Mediterranean diet (Characterised by lots of olive oil and fresh seasonal foods.), idea remains as having some value. There is dispute about what a Mediterranean diet might be, since in the Mediterranean area people ate local diets, that are very diverse. Even so, where trials of the Standard American Diet, compared with something called a Mediterranean Diet, have been done, there is always a clear winner, the Mediterranean diet.

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