*7 Another of the seven was a reanalysis of a 1964 study that had compared the health and diet of Dubliners with those of their siblings who had immigrated to Boston. The 1964 incarnation of the study concluded that the Boston Irish consumed six hundred calories a day less than their Dublin siblings and 10 percent less animal fat, but weighed more and had higher cholesterol. Heart-disease rates were similar, but the Irish brothers lived longer. This study was then reinterpreted twenty years later by Lawrence Kushi, who worked in Keys’s department at the University of Minnesota. Kushi concluded that those men who reportedly ate the most saturated fat and the least polyunsaturated fat in the early 1960s had slightly higher heart-disease rates in the years that followed. Though “The Cholesterol Facts” described the reanalysis as producing “particularly impressive results,” Kushi himself had been less impressed: “These results,” he wrote, “tend to support the hypothesis that diet is related, albeit weakly, to the development of coronary heart disease.”
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*8 When Dayton and his colleagues autopsied the men who died, they found no difference in the amount of atherosclerosis between those on the two diets.
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†9 Ordinary milk was replaced with an emulsion of soybean oil in skim milk, and butter and ordinary margarine were replaced with a margarine made of polyunsaturated fats. These changes alone supposedly increased the ratio of polyunsaturated to saturated fats sixfold.
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*10 The results were also presented at a conference of the American Heart Association in 1975. A small chart documenting the results, without explanation, was then published as an abstract in the journal Circulation, along with the other abstracts from the conference.
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*11 A second randomized double-blind controlled trial—the Heart and Estrogen/Progestin Replacement Study—tested hormone replacement in twenty-three hundred women who had already had heart disease. It also found no benefit from the hormones and suggested an increased risk of heart disease, at least for the first few years of taking hormone-replacement therapy.
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*12 Frantz’s Minnesota Coronary Survey was technically a pilot project for the National Diet-Heart Study.
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*13 The investigative reporter William Broad suggested another version of this story in Science in June 1979. He said the Dietary Goals constituted a last-ditch effort to save McGovern’s Select Committee, which had required renewal every two years since its inception and was now facing a reorganization that would downgrade its status to a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Agriculture. “They were fighting for their life,” Cortez Enloe, editor of Nutrition Today, told Broad. “Their tenure was up.”
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*14 As Dietary Goals explained, “Fat supplies 9 calories per gram, whereas protein and carbohydrates, the other two energy sources, supply only 4 calories per gram…. Consequently, particularly for those not involved in heavy physical activity, the consumption of a diet deriving 40 percent of its calories from fat may result in a continual struggle to lose weight.”
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