It's a classic, coming to me via Barry Groves' book Eat Fat, Get Thin. It took ages to find but is happily available in full text nowadays. Thank you once again to the USA for PubMed.
Back in the early 1960s there were still a number of clinicians alive who thought that that Ancel Keys was an arrogant idiot, a crook, or (more likely) both. The concepts that cholesterol caused heart disease and that drinking corn oil might prevent heart disease via cholesterol lowering were both ideas suitable for contempt.
Hard to say if Rose, Thompson and Williams were part of that perceptive group but anyway, this is the study they carried out.
They had three comparable groups of heart attack victims. One third were left alone to eat eggs, cream, sausages etc, you get the message. I was there in the 1960s in England and we ate that sort of stuff all the time, it was just food. Olive oil was a novelty and I'd never heard of corn oil. The other two groups got oil supplements.
So here's the protocol (all the jpgs just click to enlarge):
What did the macronutrient intake end up like?
Interestingly, here are the changes in TC. Of course back in the 1960s the goal posts were still centred on TC. Look at that cracking drop in the TC of the corn oil victims:
And here are the body counts, the top two lines are the dead people. Bottom right hand corner is the "event free survival" percentages at 2 years.
Fascinatingly they had two cases of diabetes, one in the olive oil group and one in the corn oil group. Both occurred on adding the oil and ameliorated on withdrawal. BUT BUT BUT you gasp, saturated fat, PALMITIC ACID for crying out loud, causes insulin resistance. Lovely oleic acid, darling of Dr Clegg's massive project, does not cause insulin resistance. Surely diabetes is insulin resistance caused by saturated fat? Well, it's your life. Clegg says oleic acid is the health nectar of the gods. Rose has noticed a reversible diabetes trigger and has a body count. Your choice!
I'll leave the summary to Rose et al:
Whenever the lipid hypothesis receives yet another fatal blow, as it does repetitively, there has to be an editorial rushed out with a death reversing ad hoc hypothesis which makes the dead people in the corn oil group pale in to insignificance.
My summary of the editorial:
Heart attack victims still need corn oil but shouldn't be so greedy and should loose a little weight too. Ad hoc hypothesis number two thousand five hundred and twenty five. Still the body count grows.
Finally my view about olive oil:
Not as bad as corn oil but butter is better!
Oh, and for anyone who is thinking of having an indwelling catheter placed in to their third ventricle for palmitic acid infusion: Don't.
Peter
