14. Don’t Trust the American Heart Association (Part 1)

14. Don’t Trust the American Heart Association (Part 1)

This is not clickbait. I mean it.

Most “medical findings” these days flow from clinical studies whose outcomes are expressed in numbers, probabilities, and statistical analysis. I am not a doctor but I understand numbers. Numbers “talk” to me. The story that I hear from a recent “medical finding” published by the American Heart Association is: You (reader) are too dumb to understand that we’re lying.

Prof. Ancel Keys was the original source of the belief that “Saturated fat in any amount is bad for your health”. In 1957, Keys published what he called The Seven Countries Study. It was nothing of the kind, and should really have been called the “Scattered Villages in Remote Areas and Selected US Railroad Workers Study”. He claimed that this Study proved that saturated fats caused heart disease. For some reason, most of the Medical Establishment and most governments on earth just believed him, despite the many holes in the Study. The Medical Establishment willfully or negligently deceived much of humanity for the past 70 years by endorsing Keys’s astonishingly bad science.

In order to prove his anti-saturated-fat beliefs, a few years later Keys conducted a much more rigorous study, the 1968-1973 Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE).

Unfortunately for Keys, the MCE soundly disproved his anti-saturated-fat thesis. There was NO difference in mortality between the saturated-fat and “healthy-fat” groups; worse, those with the lowest cholesterol had higher mortality. So Keys did what you or I or any person of flexible integrity would do: he took his name off the study and got his collaborator to bury it. It remained buried for 40 years. In the meantime no one in the Medical Establishment asked, “by the way, Ancel, where are the results of your MCE that was supposed to confirm that saturated fat is bad?”.

This shocking story is described in detail in the companion article from Plantation Bay, The Swindle of the Century, How Bad Science Became Nutrition Dogma (https://plantationbay.com/satfat).

Today, members of the Medical Establishment not only stoutly refuse to admit their 70 years of bad advice regarding saturated fat, they release MORE bad advice. The general idea seems to be to discredit modern scientific findings that could make us healthier, so that we keep buying unnecessary drugs.

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Tirzepatide stand to make hundreds of billions for drug companies. Any lifestyle practice or diet that would help you lose weight without drugs would reduce those billions, wouldn’t it?

One such diet is the Keto Diet, a term we’ll use as shorthand for the group of diets whose core idea is to drastically reduce carbohydrate intake to induce ketosis, the conversion of body fat into ketones, which are a better body and brain fuel than glucose from carbohydrates. (See my previous articles on Metabolism.) The Keto Diet works, and is well-supported by scientific studies and clinical trials. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499830/.) Not only do keto diets help reduce weight, they also might revitalize stem cells (https://news.mit.edu/2019/ketones-stem-cell-intestine-0822). A keto diet can probably also help with Alzheimer’s, bipolar, schizophrenia, generalized depression, and possibly autism (https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/04/keto-diet-mental-illness.html). And, the frosting on the cake: it looks like a keto diet might prevent or slow many cancers: https://www.can cer.columbia.edu/news/study-fi nds-keto-diet-could-contribute-cancer-metastasis.

That’s a lot of drugs, and hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars currently made by Big Pharma, that broader public information on keto diets would endanger.

There is an ongoing campaign to mis-inform the public about the keto diet. Whoever is behind the campaign, one of their leading acolytes is the American Heart Association, which also insists we need 250 grams of carbohydrate daily, thereby supporting lots of diabetes, blood pressure, Parkinson’s, bipolar, and weight-loss drug prescriptions.

On February 20, 2026, the Journal of the American Heart Association released a paper (https://www.ahajour nals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.125.042582) whose message is “a keto diet could be dangerous, because persons with more ketone bodies in their blood were tracked over 13+ years and found to have up to three times more strokes, heart attacks, and all-cause death rates than persons with fewer ketone bodies” (not a direct quote, but this phrase fairly represents what the paper is trying to make you believe).

Do you sniff a Secret Conspiracy here? I’m not going to spell out my Conspiracy Theory for you, but you can figure it out for yourself.