Factory Farms are producing fake food, Big Pharma is evil, science is a corporate conspiracy, chemistry is unnatural, buy Organic ™ - those all suddenly appeared in the social media claims of people on the right even though they made fun of them for decades. California used to be the anti-vaccine nexus of the United States (but not the world, that's France) and now it's Idaho.
Yet not everything migrated from left to right. The left still won't embrace nuclear energy, claims about increased "capacity" thanks to $9 trillion in solar and wind mandates and subsides ignore that actual electricity costs are double in areas where reliance is high, and now vegetarians, who've long had a comfortable place under the progressive umbrella, have been left by the wayside from the right as well.
Because Secretary Kennedy has turned on Ancel Keys, who was once the most prominent physiologist in America, which means the world. Because Keys warned people about the dangers of too much red meat.
To-date, Dr. Keys had survived all challenges. Corrupt groups like True Health Initiative have colluded to get journal editors fired who dared to dispute his claims. Millions of books about The Mediterranean Diet have been sold. Secretary Kennedy turning on Keys throws an entire industry opposing meat into chaos.(1)
Dr. Keys was already famous by the time he appeared on the cover of TIME in 1961 talking about the dangers of red meat. The K-Rations that kept soldiers in the field nourished during World War II were named such due to him. He was the expert the government brought in to show how to bring starved German concentration camp survivors back to health.
Credit: TIME. Used under fair use because of current news relevance and resolution too low for reproduction.
Somewhat suspect epidemiology claims from the early 1950s caused him to hypothesize that heart disease, which had gone down during the rationing of World War II, had crept back up because of the boom economy under President Eisenhower - more people were able to afford meat.
His fame got him to convince 16 groups in seven countries to help him find out, and from 1958 to 1983 the Seven Countries Study was conducted. Epidemiology can be really hit and miss and this was especially suspect. Yet the public were a lot more trusting of experts then, so when he said that diabetes and smoking were risk factors, people listened, blood pressure also made sense, but it was including serum cholesterol that created an entire food industry.
His recommendations didn't always make sense to modern eyeballs. Alcohol is just as dangerous as cigarettes, it's number two on the lifestyle disease list, so why did he say don't smoke at all but only drink a class 1 carcinogen "in moderation" - a claim too many doctors still make today?
Perhaos because he didn't smoke. But he did drink. And, surprise, the diet he already used became the best diet for everyone - the Mediterranean Diet. Fish was good because it was unsaturated fats, meat was bad, so was butter because saturated fats were killing us.
The problem was that it was not science. Yes, epidemiology uses some of the tools of science and it has had important wins. With smoking and alcohol we didn't do randomized, double-blind clinical trials and give people cancer, but in those cases the epidemiological evidence was overwhelming. For the other 12,000 epidemiology claims per year, "suggests", "linked to", and "correlated" are buzzwords that should tell the public the findings are only EXPLORATORY and may never mean causal.
When it came to red meat, his claims were not science, and International Agency for Research on Cancer claims to try and bolster his case against red meat have been so manipulated, shoddy, and unethical that even social psychologists wonder how they get UN funding but they were still posted uncritically.(2)
Now Secretary Kennedy and the MAHA movement, including a whole lot of anti-science progressives who sided with him when he was a pillar of the Democratic party have called out Keys, ironically by denying the same rationale they used to endorse him - anecdotes. He died in his 101st year, that was touted often as evidence he was right.
Dr. Keys did a lot of important things but even Elvis Presley made bad albums, and he was wrong on meat. Yet Secretary Kennedy does his cause no favors by being wrong about Keys. The study was never 15 nations. Most other claims targeting him claim is was 16. It was always seven. He may have gone into his study with an agenda but an epidemiologist who doesn't will be unemployed quickly. The data were all compiled in their own way and he asked them to normalize on one system.
Claiming that Big Margarine was behind it is just silly.
True Health Initiative and other activist groups opposed to meat are nonsensical but people who care about true health science are not better off listening to one of their advocates who has now switched to the other side misrepresenting food surveys just as badly.
NOTES:
(1) The United Kingdom imports 90 percent of their 'heart healthy' almonds from California, sprayed with fungicides and transported on emissions-belching ships, while insisting that steers and dairy cows grown locally are killing the planet with methane.
(2) The same way modern journalists publish the Environmental Working Group "dirty dozen" lists of foods with trace pesticide residues while never acknowledging that Organic industry pesticides, the corporations that fund EWG, are excluded. By the National Organic Standards Board.
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