Top Highlights

• The fact, for instance, that Japanese men who lived in Japan had low blood-cholesterol levels and low levels of heart disease was taken as a confirmation of Keys’s hypothesis, as was the fact that Japanese men in California had higher cholesterol levels and higher rates of heart disease. That Japanese men in California who had very low cholesterol ...
• As the men aged, those who succumbed to heart disease were ever more likely to have low cholesterol (as had Eisenhower) rather than high cholesterol. The cholesterol/heart-disease association was tenuous for women under fifty, and nonexistent for women older. Cholesterol has “no predictive value,” the Framingham investigators noted in 1971. This me...
• Lean people will often insist that the secret to their success is eating in moderation, but many fat people insist that they eat no more than the lean—surprising as it seems, the evidence backs this up—and yet are fat nonetheless. As the National Academy of Sciences report Diet and Health phrased it, “Most studies comparing normal and overweight pe...
• These reports, from the USDA and others, rely for their conclusions on a handful of systematic reviews of the medical literature that have been published over the past decade. The most comprehensive of these, and the one cited most frequently by these authoritative reports, is a 2000 analysis by two Finnish investigators. The Finnish review reveals...
• The clinical trials were equally inconsistent.