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flour, drinking and smoking less, and walking more. Then there was the obvious fact that butter and other animal fats are yellow and viscous, just like the fatty deposits found in the arteries of autopsied heart attack victims. It stood to reason: Cut out the cholesterol from animal fat in your diet, and you would not have plaque in your arteries (even though it contains only an insignificant amount of cholesterol along with collagen, calcium, and other materials).
    Keys arrived at his lipid hypothesis in his famous Seven Countries Study, in which he maintained that countries with the highest fat intake had the highest rates of heart disease. 148 Keys was accused of handpicking data from the countries that supported his hypothesis and ignoring those that didn’t (data was available from twenty-two countries). And just as he ignored data from the countries that didn’t support his hypothesis,Keys ignored the fact that in 1936, pathologist Kurt Landé and biochemist Warren Sperry of the Department of Forensic Medicine at New York University conducted an extensive study that found no correlation between the degree of atherosclerosis and blood cholesterol levels. 149 These findings were repeated by Indian researchers in 1961, Polish researchers in 1962, Guatemalan researchers in 1967, and Americans in 1982. 150
    Lipid biochemist David Kritchevsky, Ph.D., was a young Russian immigrant in 1954 when he conducted studies that demonstrated that rabbits fed artificial cholesterol had elevated blood cholesterol levels while rabbits fed polyunsaturated vegetable oils had lowered cholesterol levels. 151 (Fats fall roughly into three categories: saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. The polyunsaturated fats used in animal studies were extracted from soy and corn.)
    Similar studies, also done on animals, were said to prove the lipid hypothesis. But by the late 1950s, scientists understood the flaws inherent in studies that force-fed plant-eating rabbits an artificial, species-inappropriate diet. Dr. Kritchevsky agreed that artificial cholesterol is an unnatural food for a rabbit and remarked, “Alexander Pope said, ‘The proper study of mankind is man.’ But I don’t think the average guy would submit to a diet and let me tear his aorta out after six months. Animal experiments are just animal experiments.” Nevertheless, animal experiments using inappropriate vegetarian test subjects were used to promote the lipid hypothesis.
    It didn’t take much to frighten people into believing that saturated fats caused heart disease. America originated with Puritanism, after all. Like sex (which feels good), if food tastes good, it must be bad. So millions of Americans stopped eating eggs and butter and pushed away their steaks.
    Next came the instruction to eat polyunsaturated vegetable oils to lower your risk for heart disease. This pronouncement was easy to swallow too because polyunsaturated fats were found to lower cholesterol levels in animal studies. What was not understood at the time was that polyunsaturated fatty acids lower blood cholesterol because when these fatty acids, which are soft, are deposited into the cell membrane, the body must stabilize the membrane by pulling cholesterol, which is denser, out ofthe bloodstream and putting it into the cell structure. But because polyunsaturated fats were found to lower cholesterol levels in animal studies, the edible oil industry began heavily promoting polyunsaturated fats to the American public as heart healthy.
    “The trouble is that science moves rather slowly, but promoters move quickly,” Dr. Kritchevsky said. “If you published six papers that said horse manure is good for you, two days later it would be on the market.” And so it was with polyunsaturated fat research. The edible oil industry hit the ground running with their polyunsaturated fats (and their wallets open to all government and health agencies that could help them promote these fats). Meanwhile science