Ancel Keys
American physiologistWikipedia
98
MENTIONS
37
EPISODES
24
PODCASTS
Search complete. 98 mentions across 37 episodes found for "Ancel Keys".
Oct 30, 2026
Ben AzadiHOST
But it didn't matter.
Ben AzadiHOST
President Eisenhower, U.S. government, the food industry, they locked into Ancel Keys' research.
Ben AzadiHOST
By 1977, the U.S. government issued dietary guidelines telling Americans to eat less fat.
Ben AzadiHOST
By 1980...
Paul MasonGUEST
It's just to protect ourselves from skin cancers.
Paul MasonGUEST
In actual fact, Ancel Keys, the infamous Ancel Keys, he did the seven country study.
Paul MasonGUEST
One element of that study analyzed people's cholesterol level versus sun exposure.
Paul MasonGUEST
What happened? Those people who spent more time out in the sun had lower cholesterol levels.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
We knew about this back in 1961, yet I bet you each and every one of you in this room thinks that because he ate the egg, his blood should be looking all cloudy and mucky.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
So that brings us to Ancel Keys.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
He said, Look, the only sure way to control cholesterol is to reduce fat in the US diet from 40% to 15% of total calories and to cut down saturated fats from 17% to 4% of the total calories.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
He also went on to say that Americans eat too much fat and much of that saturated fat damages the arteries and leads to coronary artery disease.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
So who was Ancel Keys? Ancel Keys was appointed by the US government to come up with the key rations.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
The key rations were the rations that the soldiers used when they were in the war, that these are the rations.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
And he was the one who, for some strange reason, was given that job.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
There was an increasing incidence of coronary artery disease.
Ken BerryHOST
All these things come when you're chronically trying to starve yourself.
Ken BerryHOST
So there was this big experiment back in the 1940s done by Ancel Keys.
Ken BerryHOST
This is some of the good research that he actually did called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.
Ken BerryHOST
And he took a lot of very healthy, young, metabolically well young men who did not want to fight in the war.
Ken BerryHOST
And the amount of calories that these men were eating every day mirrors the amount of calories that the average weight loss diet would tell you to eat a day.
Ken BerryHOST
And after just a few weeks on this semi-starvation diet, these previously young, mentally and physically healthy men started to exhibit symptoms of eating disorders and mental disease that they had never had before.
Ken BerryHOST
So Ancel Keys wasn't giving these young, healthy men no food.
Ken BerryHOST
He was giving them about 1,600 calories a day.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
It's because we all got onto the fat wagon.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
When Ancel Keys, my last talk that I gave you all, came onto the scene and said, it's all fats, fats, fats cause coronary disease, all the attention went to fat and all the attention went away from sugar.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
So all this data got shoved under the carpet.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
Government agencies jumped onto the fat wagon as well.
26 MINS LATER
Pradip JamnadasHOST
The scientists all got up and said that, hey, this is wrong.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
We shouldn't be telling the American people to cut down fat when there's no evidence that it is saturated fats that cause coronary artery disease.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
But because of people like Ancel Keys and everybody else, oh, why were we so high on fats? Well, look, people were dying.
Pradip JamnadasHOST
We got to do something.
Mark HymanHOST
But they paid them the equivalent of like 50 grand to do this, and that couldn't happen now because of ethics rules, but it was pretty bad.
Mark HymanHOST
And that kind of led and sort of seeded the whole low-fat thing with Ancel Keys and all of his disciples.
Mark HymanHOST
It was quite bad.
Mark HymanHOST
I wouldn't say they were all good intentioned.
![Dr. Boz [Annette Bosworth, MD] - Keto & Fasting](https://particle.news/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=128/https://cdn.particle.pro/url/media/508a60c7-155a-59aa-9627-eb089438d905/315cc3e40562d27cbeeb3918cd2c6492d3d3d11b28d33473429c411c1d5a2c54)
Annette BosworthHOST
We were desperate for an explanation.
Annette BosworthHOST
Two theories emerged between Dr. John Yudkin and Dr. Ancel Keys.
Annette BosworthHOST
Dr. John Yudkin, a British nutritionist, wrote Pure, White, and Deadly in 1972.
Annette BosworthHOST
He predicted that sugar was the core cause of obesity, inflammation, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome.
Annette BosworthHOST
Keys had a galvanizing personality that could argue anybody to death.
Annette BosworthHOST
With the help of the sugar industry, he convinced Americans that they needed more carbohydrates and less meat.
Annette BosworthHOST
It's obvious now that Ancel Keys' advice was dead wrong.
Annette BosworthHOST
But how exactly was he able to convince the American public of this advice? Well, it stems from the research in this study of seven countries.
Marcos VázquezHOST
Muy buenas, soy Marcos Vázquez y hoy te traigo un episodio muy especial porque es la primera grabación en directo que hago después de casi quinientos episodios.
Marcos VázquezHOST
Es algo que había pensado muchas veces, pero por temas de logística, de encontrar el sitio adecuado, de gestionar las entradas, el sonido, nunca lo había hecho.
Marcos VázquezHOST
Y tengo que agradecer a Turismo de Canarias, que me lo pusieron muy fácil, gestionaron un lugar espectacular.
21 MINS LATER
Marcos VázquezHOST
Esto es muy raro.
Marcos VázquezHOST
Entonces creo que es un estudio-
Lluís SerraGUEST
Y sobre todo, Marcos, de que no sea un suplemento, que sea un alimen-
Marcos VázquezHOST
Exacto
Lluís SerraGUEST
... un hábito, porque cambiar un hábito alimentario es complicado y monitorizarlo es muy complicado.
Nina TeicholzGUEST
That was the real boost that vegetable oils were able to propel vegetable oils into the U.S. food supply was the idea that they were heart healthy.
Nina TeicholzGUEST
So at the same time that all this is happening, Ancel Keys, a physiologist from the University of Minnesota, who many people now know, but he was coming onto the scene in the 1950s.
Nina TeicholzGUEST
And he had this idea that saturated fats and dietary cholesterol were bad for health, right? Where's that found in animal foods, meat and dairy, eggs, his idea.
Nina TeicholzGUEST
was called the diet heart hypothesis, the lipid hypothesis.
Nina TeicholzGUEST
And he he was very aggressive.
Nina TeicholzGUEST
He was able to network his way to the President Eisenhower's own doctor, such that when President Eisenhower had a heart attack in 1955, and out of the Oval Office, the whole nation's attention is focused on what causes heart disease, and there is no answer.
Nina TeicholzGUEST
And into that void steps Ancel Keys with his idea, the diet heart hypothesis, that it's saturated fat and cholesterol that cause heart disease, because those foods will clog your arteries, like, you know, oil down a cold stovepipe and clog them, give you a heart attack.
Nina TeicholzGUEST
And Ancel Keys then, you know, is able to promote his idea into the American Heart Association.
Ken BerryHOST
And they actually would get more nitrates on a daily basis because they eat so many veggies.
Ken BerryHOST
than people who eat lots of meat and so you can see right away from the common sense you're going what what yeah it gets better so okay the original research study which wasn't actually research it was one of those expert opinion things that i talked to you about a minute ago from mit very very preeminent very respected university right it's been around more than 100 years they said nitrates in food cause cancer and they published this study back in I think it was 79 1979 and so turns out that this was not peer-reviewed there was no meaningful RCTs no double blinding this was basically just their expert opinion but as is the federal the federal government is want to do they very often do Kind of like they did with Ancel Keys.
Ken BerryHOST
They just said, oh gosh, nitrates will cause cancer.
Ken BerryHOST
We better make some guidelines right now.
Ken BerryHOST
And so based on no research that was credible in any way, this was made into basically federal law.
Ken BerryHOST
that nitrates will cause cancer and that you had to limit the amount of nitrates and nitrites that you put in your processed meats if you were a meat processor.
Ken BerryHOST
And so it kind of reminds you of the Ancel Keys seven country study episode where basically based on flawed, non-peer reviewed research, all of a sudden now we have federal guidelines of how you should eat.
Ken BerryHOST
so yeah that's this is where this all started was an mit publication that said nitrate causes cancer in rodents not even in humans and the federal government immediately put some guidelines in place to protect us from this imagined threats and so in 1981 the national academies of science did a big review of all the available research and they said nitrates are absolutely no risk for cancer they're not carcinogenic at all We don't know what they were talking about.
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