Chris Masterjohn

But what happens that drives the atherosclerotic plaque is that the fats you get from seed oils that are on the outside of it get damaged.

And when they get damaged, the immune system recognizes it as a toxin that could hurt the blood vessel.

And so the immune system gobbles it up and sequesters it.

And that sequestering is like a quarantine.

And that's what the plaque develops from.

And so that's why even though you see prospectively that if your cholesterol is higher, that that predicts that you're more likely to get heart disease later, in the randomized controlled trials, you saw something quite different.

when they used seed oils to lower the cholesterol.

So the Minnesota Coronary Survey was another, I mentioned the LA Veterans Administration Hospital Study.

These were the two double-blind randomized controlled trials that were done of seed oils.

The Minnesota Coronary Survey was very big.

It was the only one that included women.

And it wasn't as long, but it was way larger.

And back when they published the results, it looked like there was an 8% increase in the risk of heart disease with the seed oils, but they mentioned that they measured actual atherosclerosis and they didn't report it.

So decades later, like I think it was about 10 years ago, researchers noticed this and they said, well, the guys that did this study are dead, but I wonder if the atherosclerosis results are around.

So they did some digging and it turned out that in the basement of the house that the lead investigator lived in, who had died a long time ago,

There were boxes of data that had not been published from that study, and they included all the atherosclerosis measurements.

And what they found was that the seed oil group had double the atherosclerosis.

Not only that, but every 35 milligram per deciliter drop in cholesterol was associated with something like 30% more heart disease.

And so the original results didn't look very—they didn't look good for CETLs.

They looked bad, but they didn't look that bad.