Talk:Ancel Keys/Archive 1

CVD studies before Keys
the following paper is the cohort study including CVD mortality. Keys's study may not be the first, strictly speaking.

DOLL R, HILL AB. Lung cancer and other causes of death in relation to smoking; a second report on the mortality of British doctors. Br Med J. 1956 Nov 10;12(5001):1071-81

This is reprinted in BMJ, 328 (7455): 1529. (2004)

how much did he learn from: A University of Minnesota study in the late 1940s injected 11 public service employee volunteers with malaria, then starved them for five days. Some were also subjected to hard labor, and those men lost an average of 14 pounds. They were treated for malarial fevers with quinine sulfate. One of the authors was Ancel Keys... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.164.17.91 (talk) 19:02, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Disputing CVD epidemiology
The problem with epidemiological studies is that they can only show an association, but not prove cause and effect. Ancel Keys was a nutritionist and associated the incidence of CVD with diet. There is a much closer correlation of the incidence of CVD with geographic latitude, and thus ambient temperature. If this is the right answer then fifty years have been wasted promoting dietary change in populations to little effect. The incidence of CVD is now falling, but this is possibly mainly resulting from global warming. Warrenward 22:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)warrenward


 * That's even worse conjecture than cholesterol being associated with CVD. Now it's global warming? Japan is at the same latitude as California, yet Japanese in California suffer notably higher incidence of CVD. Perhaps now it's a meridial relation? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.199.244.100 (talk) 13:12, 14 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Some people can not resist stepping over the line. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.29.232.166 (talk) 23:38, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Bad Science
I am not a nutritionist, but do have an interest in this field and believe that the Seven Countries study of Ancel Keys has being much criticised. Should this piece on Ancel Keys mention criticisms of the Seven Countries Study? If expert nutritionists wish to challenge me here, I shall bow to their superior knowledge. Yours, Cardamom 11:26, 3 August 2005

I agree with Cardamon. It has been documented by Dr Uffe Ravnskov that Keys deliberately selected his data to support his hypothesis. There is no correlation in the data sets available to him at the time. This probably set back finding any true relationship between heart disease and diet by 50 years. I disagree with Warrenward. The incidence of heart disease is not falling, but the number of interventions carried out such as bypass and angioplasty has increased phenomenally which tends to reduce the number of deaths from CVD. Another thing which correlates with latitude is sunshine and hence vitamin D status.

I'd certainly like to see a reference to Keys' bad science. This would not be popular with all the other bad scientists out there who adhere to his much disproved hypothesis. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cwbeal (talk • contribs) 19:20, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Keys' science is specifically criticized in Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" which is meticulously researched, footnoted, and written by a fine science writer who spent seven years at the task. Karpinski (talk) 06:48, 6 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I reformuated some of the critisism. Ancel Keys referred to six countries in his landmark speech and the paper that followed in 1953. That was based on the data compiled by the FAO. The 7CS study was initiated at the end of the 1950s and came out in 1970s. The 7CS was prospective cohort study and had nothing to do with the paper Yerushalmy and Hilleboe was addressing, though. The authors Y & H simply pointed that Keys had overlooked the role animal protein which had whopping 0,756 correlation to deaths from atherosclerosis (see Yerushalmy and Hillboe paper 1958, figure 15 with correlation co-efficients from various dietary components to death rates) compared to 0,684 for animal fats to deaths from atherosclerosis. The critisism towards Ancel Keys is mainly done in low-carb layman books which often have their Ancel Keys story 100% factually flawed. These are not peer-reviwed works and should be dealt with high level of skepticismPodomi (talk) 21:16, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Poor grammar
"Keys attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a B.A. in economics and political science (1925), an M.S. in biology (1929), and is a '30 University of California, San Diego Alumus receiving a Ph.D. in oceanography and biology from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography."

Does that mean that Keys received two degrees from Berkeley and one from both UCSD and Scripps? Whatever it means, the grammar is flawed by faulty parallelism, and "Alumus" is misspelled and wrongly capitalized. Unfree (talk) 07:27, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Fleshing out the story (and criticisms) of Ancel Keys
Hello, I have been working on building this article and will continue to do so over the next few weeks. I was especially motivated to do this after reading Gary Taubes' Big Fat Lie and Lierre Keith's Vegetarian Myth and Robert Lustig's interesting video Sugar: The Bitter Truth. In each, they hang up Ancel Keys to dry over his studies and of the three, Lustig is perhaps the one who is least harsh. I decided to do some research at my university and from firsthand sources and journals regarding Ancel Keys and though there is some truth to what has been said about him, it appears that the average reader of such works is receiving a one-sided report of a man who by all accounts deserves far more credit for the good that he did than for all the villifications. The point of Wikipedia, if i'm not mistaken, is to report on notable individuals' accomplishments, in particular from their peers and from the relative environment in which they occurred. The article, as i saw it, lacked any such substantiations and instead was a big hodgepodge of copy-paste that only obscured the article rather than made it easy to understand. Some points that i feel need clarification:
 * 1) His educational and research background: Rather than being a careless and dogmatic ideologue, we see that as early as his childhood, he was an unconventional thinker and believed in the value of extensive research. A student who works and still completes two doctorates in the time most average college students would complete a single degree--OK, maybe it took fewer years in the past--is damn impressive.
 * 2) Building on research: From his early work in comparing fish size to weight to his development of protein extraction techniques, the guy built on previous research long before he became an opinion maker in regards to nutrition. Throughout his early career, we see that it is his ideas in an organism's regular and predictable physiological responses to its environment becomes a theme, but only after extensive research proves this to be the case. This is often overlooked today, as most of us would not dispute that eating too much can make you fat or that you can affect your blood pressure. The fact that in his time, the general immutability of the body (affected only by aging and genetics) such that diet and environment were considered unimportant, must be considered when recalling that he helped dispel this idea. Finally, few folks ever respect the awesome amount of work that he put into his research, bordering on what we'd today consider as OCD given the excruciating detail he went to understand his findings. Even today, such detail is rare in scientific journals.
 * 3) Academic dishonesty: The section on criticisms by Uffe Ravnskov and Gary Taubes are unsourced and unsubstantiated. We need to remember that anyone on the Internet and IRL can criticize someone, but to accuse someone of falsifying conclusions and cherry-picking data is a libelous calumny without the source of the claim and the evidence that the claimant has to back up his claim. This is not to deny that such things happened, but to insure that negative information is well-sourced and justified if put under peer-review. We must also properly contextualize such criticism as to WHEN it happened and the environment in which it happened because this lets us know if the criticism was by a single or a few dissenters or by the majority of the academic establishment. We know that in the early days of the 1950s and 1960s, most physicians were critical of the lipid hypothesis, but not primarily because they thought Keys was a fraud. Most folks were simply as resistant to the idea of environmentally (e.g., diet and exercise) induced changes in human physiology (e.g., blood pressure, serum lipid profiles, lung capacity) in the same way that mainstream science was resistant to the idea of a low carbohydrate diet in the 1970s to 2000s. While some such resistance can be chalked up to idiocy (someone told me), traditionalism (stick with what was known), ideological agendas (some vegetarians), and business (e.g., the grain industries), it would be unfair to dismiss honest scientists who had genuine reservations to a scientific proposal that under close scrutiny had some holes in it. In this same way, many of Keys' early retractors were not people who were merely idiots, food industrialists, or other intellectually lazy folks; many scientists had problems with the hypothesis from the get-go and felt that more research was needed (e.g., the AHA in the early 50s). We should properly characterize such criticism and source it before simply calling Keys out as a fibber, that is, unless we can prove he fibbed. (nb. any academic scholar can fudge some data for reasons of rounding or other non-malicious needs, and when you produce as much data as Keys did in his nearly 1400 page book, its likely you will find some such fudging, but let's not paint this guy out to be another Jan Hendrik Schön or Andrew Wakefield just because we feel we don't like him). the point of this bullet (for those who don't want to read) is source, justify, and contextualize all criticism to avoid biasing Wikipedia's NPOV policy.
 * 4) The Lipid Hypothesis: I too disagree with much of it it and generally agree that there is much misinformation that is being spewed out there, but i do not want to contribute to the misinformation on this side of the argument either. I feel that dishonesty and bias on any side hurts the cause of intellectual advancement so that we should rightly criticize those who want to bias information against someone they don't like. If the opinion of Keys resulted in a shift, we source that. If the opinion of Keys was wrong at the time, we should source that. If it caused an information cascade, we should again source a peer-reviewed source that properly argues and provides evidence for that.

Thank you, I hope I have both explained my motivations for correcting this article, and convinced a few of you to dig deeper than what you see in an article and contribute to its accuracy.Skaaii (talk) 19:49, 7 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Agreed on almost every point! But more importantly is to keep in mind that AT THE TIME his research was breakthrough. The fact that much later research has added a greater understanding shouldn't be a part of a person's biography in WIKI. Maybe a link to a separate page debating the modern controversy in light of new research? This way the lipid hypothesis can be discussed without creating bias on a person's biography page? 68.12.189.233 (talk) 20:34, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

"Great Man Theory" and neutral tone
The opening section has the following line

"In the midst of arguing against his work in her book The Big Fat Surprise (2014), journalist Nina Teicholz writes that if there is a Great Man theory of history, 'In the history of nutrition, Ancel Keys was, by far, the Greatest Man.'"

This is perfectly accurate, and even links inline to "Great Man theory" for further explanation. However, I can't help thinking it mis-represents Teicholz's intent by taking her words out of context. Even clicking through to the "Great Man theory" wikipedia article and reading its opening section (which describes it in quite positive terms), anyone not familiar with the theory would still very much see the above line as complimentary. For context, the preceding lines from Teicholz imply he had undue, not benign, influence on the course of history:

"the story of nutritional science is not, as we would expect, the story of sober-minded researchers moving with judicious steps. It falls, instead, under the 'Great Man' theory of history, whereby strong personalities steer events using their own personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom or wits. In the history of nutrition, Ancel Keys was, by far. the Greatest Man."

Ian Lesly article
Having read "the sugar conspiracy" by Ian Lesly in the Guardian (open access article) Keys comes across as a fraud. Is this article having problems? V8rik (talk) 15:55, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
 * If multiple WP:MEDRS call him a "fraud," we would say that. If multiple WP:MEDRS defend him against those charges, we would say that too. That's standard Wikipedia WP:NPOV treatment of controversy. I'm not sure how we handle sources that are WP:RS but not WP:MEDRS. I would accept editorials or news stories in Science, Nature or BMJ as WP:MEDRS.

External links modified
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Death
What did he die from? Wythy (talk) 14:43, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Old age: he was nearly 101.--Quisqualis (talk) 21:43, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Old age is not a disease. What specifically killed Keys?Wythy (talk) 17:33, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Note that it is extraordinarily uncommon for a person of advanced age to be subjected to autopsy, unless they arrange it and pay for it in advance. Your best bet is to contact his family, who likely have no clear answer.--Quisqualis (talk) 19:17, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

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What did Keys die from, specifically?
Old age obviously is not the answer.

Was it stroke, cancer?

What was the cause of his death?

No "old age" answers, please.Wythy (talk) 17:32, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Bias
This article seems very one-sided in its evaluation of Keys’ discoveries (and the controversy surrounding it). 140.180.240.10 (talk) 00:22, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Falsified information
Falsified information. 2600:100A:B120:A6F4:B1CF:9593:23A4:C132 (talk) 22:32, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Minnesota Study Discussion Confusing
The article states: The study shows no positive effects of the altered dietary intake. Cardiovascular mortality of patients over 65 years of age increased by the replacement of saturated fats. Yet the quote from Ramsden says: lower[ed] serum cholesterol ... does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes. The article should say: Cardiovascular mortality of patients over 65 years of age increased by the replacement of saturated fats with linoleic acid (an unsaturated fat). Andyberks (talk) 17:24, 21 January 2023 (UTC)