Chris Masterjohn

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.

And they weren't statistically significant.

But it was because there was a lot of—people were coming in and out of the trial.

It kind of weakened the results.

But the atherosclerosis results and the correlations that were buried in those boxes show that when you look at the data from that angle, the seed oils look a lot worse.

And I think what you're seeing there, this is one of the reasons why there's so much material to work with to make controversy out of this, is that you see that people with higher cholesterol when they're younger are more likely to go on to have a heart attack.

But when you use seed oils, which...

lower the cholesterol in the blood, but increase the amount of these easily damaged fatty acids that carry the cholesterol, and they get damaged and they drive the atherosclerotic plaque, that's why you see this divergence.

That correlation exists there, but not everything that you do with your diet to change it, to try to make the correlation work in your favor does you good.