Let’s start early on with some of the first evidence that came before even Ancel Keys published his discredited Seven Countries Study that kicked off the whole low-fat debacle. Let’s look at data from the venerable Framingham study that was so inconclusive that it wasn’t even published in a peer-reviewed journal.
For those who don’t know the Framingham Heart Study was kicked off back in the late 1940s in Framingham, MA. under the direction of the National Heart Institute (now known as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) According to their website
The objective of the Framingham Heart Study was to identify the common factors or characteristics that contribute to CVD by following its development over a long period of time in a large group of participants who had not yet developed overt symptoms of CVD or suffered a heart attack or stroke.
A large number of residents of Framingham were recruited into this longitudinal study that is still going on today. There are children (and probably grandchildren) of the original Framingham participants enrolled in the study currently. Researchers are monitoring diet, medication history, and a host of other parameters, and have generated God only knows how many papers using this data that has been collected over the past almost 60 years.
One of the first ideas that the researchers had was to look at how diet related to cholesterol levels and how diet related to the development of heart disease. I’ll give you the surprise ending right up front: there wasn’t any correlation. What’s interesting about this part of the study, however, is that the researchers didn’t publish it at the conclusion of the study, so it never really saw the light of day. You’ve probably heard the old saying that doctors bury their mistakes. Well, researchers often bury outcomes they don’t expect and don’t welcome.
In the case of this part of the Framingham study, ten years after the work was completed a statistician gathered the data and put it into typewritten form with a blue binding and disseminated it to the academic community under the name of the then director of the project Dr. Willam Kannel. As the statistician, Tavia Gordan, put it in the editorial note at the beginning
This report is based on a selection from a large body of tabular material prepared since the completion of data collection for the Framingham Diet Study. Unfortunately, these data were never incorporated into a definitive report by the original investigators and a large amount of very careful and thoughtful work has lain unused in the Framingham files. [my italics]
Once I learned of the existence of this report, I got hot on its trail.
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