Linda Gardner's Blog: The Hidden Truth Behind Ancel Keys’ Famous Fat Graph

How was it possible for Big Sugar to make people believe for decades, that fat was dangerous and sugar was fine? By paying researchers to manipulate data, as revealed this week.

For a while, in the middle of the last century, there was a scientific struggle. Was fat or sugar to blame for cardiovascular disease? Ancel Keys was the champion of the first theory, Professor John Yudkin of the other. Keys won, not least by using cherry-picked statistics.

The left graph above was famously used sixty years ago by Keys, to support his idea that fat intake was responsible for heart disease. But as the right graph shows, the same data could just as easily have implicated sugar. It was just a question of what you were looking for.

Since that time, we’ve spent half a century mistakenly fearing natural fat, and instead eating more carbs – with a resulting epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Now it’s time to see the truth:

Sugar was the link. Yudkin was right.