Another Day, Another Study That Makes the Diet-Heart Hypothesis Look Rather Silly

Seed oil debate incoming!

Well, well, well. Here we go again. Just when you thought the "saturated fat is the devil" brigade had run out of ways to ignore inconvenient data, along comes a gem from the archives that's been gathering dust since the 1970s. Today's featured performer: The Minnesota Coronary Experiment, a study so awkward for conventional nutrition wisdom that it took until 2016 for someone to properly dust it off and publish the full results. Spoiler alert: it doesn't end well for team seed oil.

The Simple Summary

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, researchers ran a proper randomized controlled trial on nearly 10,000 people. Half got a diet loaded with corn oil (high in linoleic acid), while the other half ate a diet higher in saturated fat. The corn oil group saw their cholesterol drop by nearly 14%, which should have meant fewer heart attacks and longer lives according to the prevailing wisdom.

Plot twist: More people in the corn oil group died. And when they looked at the hearts of those who …