Eisenhower's heart attack sent the country looking for answers. Ancel Keys had one, and we’re still debating it today.

HISTORY This Week

This episode explores the profound impact of nutrition scientist Ancel Keys, whose diet-heart hypothesis fundamentally reshaped global eatin

Key takeaways

• President Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack brought sudden, massive public attention to cardiovascular health risks.
• Ancel Keys utilized an observational approach in his Seven Countries Study to link saturated fat to heart disease.
• Dr. Paul Dudley White provided significant scientific legitimacy to Keys' research through high-profile endorsements.
• Critics like Nina Teicholz argue that Keys may have cherry-picked data by excluding countries with high saturated fat intake but low heart disease rates.
• The shift toward low-fat diets inadvertently encouraged the consumption of processed carbohydrates and trans fats.

Main topics

• Eisenhower's heart attack
• Ancel Keys' biography
• The Seven Countries Study

Notable quotes

Ansel Keys may well have shaped the way Americans, and the globe ate and eat. more than any other biomedical scientist of the 20th century.

Conclusion

The episode offers a compelling look at how scientific hypotheses can

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The History Channel original podcast. Speaker 5 (0:06) History This Week, September 24th, 1955. I'm Sally Helm. It started with a hamburger topped with Bermuda onions. Speaker 5 (0:23) President Eisenhower wolfed it down on Saturday, the 23rd of September, between two games of golf. He was on an extended work-and-play vacation in Colorado. And during his afternoon game that day, he gets what feels like indigestion. He thinks, it's got to be that hamburger. He goes home, heads to bed early. Speaker 5 (0:47) And then, around 2 a.m. Sunday morning, he wakes up. And now he's in pain. Something is wrong. Eisenhower's wife summons the White House physician, who gives the president some morphine. But in the morning, he's still having chest pain. The doctor has an electrocardiograph brought to the president's bedside, and that confirms it. This is not hamburger-related indigestion. It's a heart attack. Speaker 5 (1:18) Eisenhower is rushed to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in a Secret Service car. And later that day, the American public learns that their war hero president, a five-star general, is on oxygen in a hospital in Denver. In Boston, an eminent cardiologist named Paul Dudley White hears the news on his car radio. A couple hours later, he finds himself summoned to the president's bedside to examine the nation's most famous patient. Soon after that, White is standing in front of about 150 reporters, and he tries to deliver calming news. He says the president has suffered a, quote, average heart attack and that he's recovering well. But the nation is really scared. And not just for the president, also for themselves. Heart disease in the 1950s is on the rise. People want to know what they should do to prevent it. And one person who gives advice in the coming months is Dr. White. He's like this comforting parental voice saying, you should exercise. Get out there on a bike. Don't smoke. And he also talks about what people should eat. Speaker 5 (2:38) In one article printed in the New York Times in October 1955, White points to the work of a nutrition scientist named Ansel Keys. Keys was becoming known for something called the diet-heart hypothesis. It gives nutritional advice that you've definitely heard and probably Speaker 4 (2:57) tried to follow. Ansel Keys may well have shaped the way Americans and the globe ate and eat. more than any other biomedical scientist of the 20th century, both intentionally and unintentionally. Speaker 5 (3:16) Today, Ansel Keys' nutritional advice takes off and takes on a life of its own. How did Keys, an oceanographer turned nutrition scientist, end up changing the world's relationship with fats? And was this a change for the better? Speaker 1 (3:39) G'day, I'm Justin Wolfers, host of the Platypus Economics podcast. If there's one thing I've learned from a career teaching economics, it's that your life is shaped by economic currents you'll never see. A single price tag can explain things a thousand experts can't. People who understand economics, they make better decisions in their careers, their finances, their relationships, and their communities. And I want that for you. Listen to and follow Platypus Economics, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (4:11) In the 1950s, Americans, and particularly well-off American businessmen, start to die in huge numbers of heart attacks. And the cause is something of a mystery. Speaker 2 (4:24) We were seeing an explosion of coronary heart disease in the 1950s. I mean, it was really a true pandemic. Speaker 5 (4:36) Dr. Stephen Nissen is a cardiologist at the renowned Cleveland Clinic. Specifically, he's the chief academic officer of the Heart and Vascular Institute. He'll be one of our guides in this story. And he said the American public in the 1950s was very aware of this risk. Speaker 2 (4:53) What the public came to hear a lot about was a phenomenon known as sudden cardiac death. Someone would simply drop to the ground. Sometimes clutching their chest and never recover. Speaker 5 (5:10) Scientists are looking for the cause. Why this big increase in terrifying heart attacks? And one person who gets interested in this, starting in the 1940s, is a researcher named Ansel Keys. We talked about him with Sarah Tracy. She'll be another one of our guides. She's spent almost a decade working on Speaker 4 (5:32) a biography of Keys. Most people haven't heard of Ansel Keys. They may have heard of the Mediterranean diet or BMI, you know, the flawed biometric index. So they've heard of things that he worked on or developed, but they don't necessarily know who Keys was. But Sarah Speaker 5 (5:52) Tracy knows him. I Speaker 4 (5:53) have spent more time with him in the archive than I would care to share. In fact, I feel as if sometimes I know Ansel Keys better than he knew himself. Speaker 5 (6:07) Tracy has read a lot about Keys, and there's a lot to read, a lot of records. For one thing, Keys was a participant in this 80-year longitudinal study of, quote, gifted children. Speaker 4 (6:20) He was a polymath. I don't think there's any question about that. And he happened to have enough talent to be kind of good at just about anything he set his mind to. And I think being considered a genius both put pressure on Keyes to excel, and it also gave him confidence. As is true of many confident geniuses. He could be belligerent. He could be combative. But also, he was determined. He was remarkably resourceful. His resourcefulness turned out Speaker 5 (6:56) to be important because Keyes graduated with a Ph.D. in oceanography in 1930, right at the start of the Great Depression. Not a lot of oceanography jobs, but Keyes makes it work. Speaker 5 (7:11) He ends up studying eels in Copenhagen, goats and eagles at Cambridge University in England. And then he gets wind of something called the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory back in Boston. They are doing basically the first studies of physical exercise. What does it do to and for the human body? Keyes goes to work for them. Speaker 4 (7:35) At the Harvard Fatigue Lab, Keyes gets the chance to fulfill his adventurous spirit and lead an international high-altitude expedition. And this is transformative for him. It is his entry point into human physiology. Speaker 5 (7:53) A few years later, he winds up at the University of Minnesota studying athletes. And Speaker 4 (7:59) that is kind of where nutrition begins to enter the picture. He's looking at whether diet can make you a better basketball Speaker 5 (8:07) player or track runner. Tracy says people pay attention