One of the most rigorous scientific experiments on the effects of fatty foods in the diet took some 40 years to complete, but the results are now in. Reports the Washington Post:
Collectively, the fuller results undermine the conventional wisdom regarding dietary fat that has persisted for decades and is currently enshrined in influential publications such as the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. And the long-belated story of the Minnesota Coronary Experiment suggests just how difficult it can be for new evidence to see the light of day when it contradicts widely held theories.
The special diet given to mental patients in Minnesota did succeed in its intent to reduce cholesterol levels. What no one anticipated was that participants were more likely than patients on a conventional diet to die earlier.
Bacon’s bottom line. First question: By regulating and brow-beating food processors to reformulate their packaged foods and by pushing Americans into embracing the new nutritional guidelines, social engineers succeeded in altering the American diet. How many millions of Americans have died as a result?
As an aside, given the obsession with race and class today, one is tempted to ask also if minorities and the poor were disproportionately impacted. Did the nutritional social engineering of the 1970s lead to more obesity, more hypertension, more coronary blockage, and more diabetes than would have occurred otherwise? How many millions suffered death and disability as a result?
Second question: Will the social engineers ever own up to this calamitous public health failure and their complicity, however well intended, in the premature death of millions of Americans? Will Black Lives Matter point an accusing finger at the nutritional policies that arguably have snuffed out a thousand times more African-Americans lives than unjustified police killings?
Third question: What can we learn about what happens when science, politics and scientific funding intersect? As the WaPo summarizes why early results of the study were buried when they conflicted with orthodoxy:
The Minnesota investigators had a theory that they believed in — that reducing blood cholesterol would make people healthier. Indeed, the idea was widespread and would soon be adopted by the federal government in the first dietary recommendations. So when the data they collected from the mental patients conflicted with this theory, the scientists may have been reluctant to believe what their experiment had turned up.
Could the same thing be happening in some other sphere of public policy? Could contradictory scientific evidence be ignored or suppressed? Just asking.
— JAB
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