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to heart disease. For example, the work of Bernard Hennig, published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition , 2001, indicates that an excess of omega-6 fatty acids (from commercial vegetable oils) contributes to pathological changes in the cells lining the arteries, and hence to heart disease. There is also much research demonstrating that the trans fats in many manufactured foods (the same foods people eat to avoid saturated fats) contribute to a wide range of illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, and obesity.
    In particular, the entire ideology behind the indictment of saturated fats for increasing cholesterol, and cholesterol for causing arteriosclerosis, is faulty. But don’t just take our word for it. To ensure that you feel comfortable following our healthy-fat, coconut-rich diet plans, this chapter will continue your “fats education” by laying out the history of the connection mistakenly made between saturated fats and heart disease, and explain why you never knew these facts until now.
    We’ll begin by examining the following core questions:
Does saturated fat raise cholesterol?
Does cholesterol cause atherosclerosis and heart disease?
Does scientific evidence support or contradict the view that saturated fats raise cholesterol, thus causing heart disease?
Are polyunsaturated oils “heart healthy,” as we’ve been led to believe?
    Next, we’ll explain how we came to accept the theory that there’s a link between saturated fats, cholesterol, and heart disease. This second part of the story is not scientific but historic, as we go back to the early 20th century to trace the evolution of the “lipid hypothesis,” a theory that scientists held sacred for decades but are finally beginning to question as more and more contradictory evidence appears.

    The Anti-Fat Campaign
    The term “lipid hypothesis”—the theory that saturated fats and cholesterol in our food raise cholesterol levels in the blood, leading to heart disease—was coined in the 1950s by Ancel Keys, author of several epidemiological studies that, although in our opinion were severely flawed, are frequently quoted as supporting the theory that animal fats cause heart disease. (Another term, the “Diet-Heart Idea,” was used by Dr. George Mann, who had participated in an important long-term study and became highly critical of the hypothesis.) This theory is so prevalent, so widely believed, and so fundamental to the modern treatment of cardiovascular illness, that up until now you’ve probably never heard that it is only one theory of heart disease, and that a different reading of the data, along with volumes of other research, supports a very different conclusion: that saturated fats do not contribute to heart disease and in fact actually protect us against this and many other diseases.
    The lipid hypothesis grew out of scientists’ attempts to grapple with a steep rise in heart disease, from less than 10 percent of all deaths at the turn of the 20th century to 30 percent of all deaths by 1950 (and almost 45 percent of all deaths today). Even more disturbing, most of the increase was due to a new phenomenon, myocardial infarction (MI) or heart attack, which did not exist before the 1920s. During the 1950s, Dr. Dudley White, the most famous cardiologist of his day (he was President Eisenhower’s physician), noted that heart disease had increased as the consumption of liquid vegetable oils increased and the consumption of eggs and traditional fats like butter and lard declined. The use of margarine quadrupled, and that of vegetable oils more than tripled, between 1900 and 1950, while egg consumption declined by half.
    What’s more, after World War II, manufacturers began hydrogenating these liquid oils so that they could be used as a substitute for coconut oil and animal fats in baked goods. Thus more and more Americans were consuming products like Wesson Oil and Crisco, processed fats that had never been part of the