How it all started... · Mind and Body Solutions

How it all started...

In 1967, the New England Journal of Medicine published a literature review that reshaped how Americans ate for the next 50 years.

It was titled "Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Disease," and it concluded that saturated fat was the dietary culprit in heart disease.

Not sugar but saturated fat.

Hence, the diet-heart hypothesis that governs much of modern nutritional thinking:

Saturated fat raises blood cholesterol, and blood cholesterol drives heart disease. Therefore, reducing saturated fat reduces heart disease.

The journal didn't disclose (and wasn't required to at the time) that the review had been funded by the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), the trade association for the US sugar industry.

The SRF paid the equivalent of ~$48,000 in 2026 dollars to three Harvard nutrition scientists:

Frederick Stare (chair of Harvard Nutrition), D. Mark Hegsted (who’d later help write the first US Dietary Guidelines), and Robert McGandy.

According to internal industry documents uncovered by Cristin Kearns and her UCSF colleagues in 2016, the SRF hand-selected which studies the reviewers analyzed. Internal correspondence showed the industry communicating what they wanted the outcome to be. The Harvard scientists delivered it.

For five decades, doctors, dietitians, and government agencies built the case against animal fats — and the case for the low-fat, ultra-processed , seed-oil-enriched American diet — on top of that paper and the others that followed in its wake.

As you can see, politic and money were the driving force behind this, not science...

As a matter of fact, I wrote 2 books with close to 2000 scientific references demonstrating that meat has been been part of human diet. On top of that, it is important to nourish your body properly in order to reach optimum health!

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How it all started...