How the Low-Fat Era started

How the Low-Fat Era started:

1955: President Eisenhower suffers a heart attack. At the time, heart disease is rapidly rising and largely unexplained. The crisis demands a narrative, and fast.

Into the vacuum steps Ancel Keys, a confident and politically savvy scientist who promotes the idea that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. This becomes known as the diet-heart hypothesis.

1961: The American Heart Association, under Keys’ influence, publishes the world’s first official dietary advice: avoid saturated fat and cholesterol.

1977: The Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, led by non-expert staffers with ideological biases, adopts this advice wholesale—pushing a plant-based, low-fat, high-carb diet as national policy.
Procter & Gamble and other corporations help fund and promote this model, because it supports the sale of Crisco, margarine, seed oils, and grain-based processed foods.

Over time, the guidelines become institutional dogma, enshrined by the USDA, American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, and taught in medical schools.

None of this was built on high-quality clinical trial data.

The trials that did exist often contradicted the hypothesis—and were buried or ignored.