The Women's Health Initiative (1991)

The old Framingham Study, had been very useful, but it was producing all sorts of strange mixed results. The results the researchers expected were not usually in the data. Something better was needed.

The WHI was the most expensive trial of low-fat diets ever attempted. Almost 49,000 post-menopausal women were enrolled. The trial cost $400 million. Dietary intervention group; n=19541. Control group; n=29294.

The dietary intervention group was offered training, group meetings, and consultation. They were encouraged to eat a low-fat diet, (Fat about 20% of total calories.) with increased consumption of fruits, vegetables and grains. This was achieved quite well. In the beginning fat intake was reduced by 10.7% and later in the study by 8.2%. There was a small improvement if blood risk factors associated with cardio vascular disease, but no reduction in incidence.

Results After Eight Years - Low-fat Group

No reduction in heart disease
No reduction in strokes
No reduction in breast cancer
No reduction in colon cancer

In addition, there was no significant weight loss either. ( Av. 1 pound another source says.)

This is a very important study. Here is the full paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006.

Therefore: a diet high in carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, with low fat, does NOT improve health.

Framingham was producing results, that nobody believed, but did often agree with these surprising WHI results.

WHI, carefully constructed, also produces results the researchers didn't expect. Embarrassing.

The study stopped just over eight years after it began.

Attempts were made to get behind the data and make it come out "right" but it won't.

The final result was published in 2006.

The NIH Refuses to Accept the WHI Result

Dr Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the NIH appeared on television to confirm that people should strive to eat the recommended diet, low-fat and high-carbohydrate. She laid emphasis on the need to reduce the saturated fat in the diet.

Dr Elizabeth Nabel, does not yet know what livestock farmers know. We have to go to Europe, to find experts less invested in the status quo, who can read the confusing data with less bias.

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines

By now, least two-dozen long term studies had demonstrated that the low-fat high-carbohydrate diet was not a healthy diet.

The most important of these were:
The Framingham Study
The Women's Health Initiative
The Oslo Heart Study
and the Western Electric Study.

Even so, the 2010 Dietary Guidelines do not change the recommendation for 30 years.

How Can "They All" Be Wrong?

Surely the Advisory Committee for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the US Department of Agriculture, and the Harvard School of Public Health, have the expertise to advise us on diet.

You would think so. Yet despite the repeated failure, they keep repeating the same recommendation.

Everybody knows what a "healthy diet" is. They also know that the "healthy diet" isn't healthy for most people. Look on the street, most people are not blind, but most Americans are fat.

Perhaps to stand against that "healthy diet" idea, is professionally and politically unwise. So people accept the status quo and allow the old recommendation to sustain itself.

Repeatedly, the experts blame the public for not following the guidelines. Does that explain the WHI result, where we know people did, for the most part, follow the guidelines?

Why Can't We Learn?

We have to go back to Ancel Keys, to the McGovern Committee, to the "success" of Dean Ornish, who was called "The Healer of Hearts," to prove "what we know" that can't possibly be wrong; can in fact be wildly off track.

The commitment to a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, with lots of vegetables and fruit, and high in carbohydrates, including whole grains, became a belief that seemed to be written in stone.

For forty years, hundreds of efforts to give scientific validation to that belief have failed. Yet the doctors and the researchers can't believe their own evidence.

Over and over we hear, "We know that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, is a healthy diet." The problem is that every scientific effort to prove that turns out wrong.