By 1952, the University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys was arguing that high blood levels of cholesterol caused heart disease, and that it was the fat in our diets that drove up cholesterol levels. Keys had a conflict of interest: his research had been funded by the sugar industry—the Sugar Research Foundation and then the Sugar Association—since 1944, if not earlier, and the K-rations he had famously developed for the military during the war (the “K” is said to have stood for “Keys”) were loaded with sugar. This might have naturally led him to perceive something other than sugar as the
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Wow.
