Ancel Keys

Ancel Benjamin Keys (January 26, 1904 – November 20, 2004) was an American scientist who studied the influence of diet on health. In particular, he hypothesised that different kinds of dietary fat had different effects on health.

In addition to his role in establishing modern cardiovascular disease (CVD) epidemiology, Keys was closely associated with two famous diets: K-rations, formulated as balanced meals for combat soldiers in World War II;  and the "Mediterranean diet", which he popularized with his wife Margaret. Science, diet, and health have been central themes of his professional and private lives.

Early life
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 a Ph.D. in oceanography and biology (1930). He earned a second Ph.D. in physiology at Cambridge in 1938. In 1936, he became a professor at the University of Minnesota, where he established the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. Keys directed the laboratory from 1939 until his retirement in 1975.

Professional
During World War II, Keys studied starvation and sustinence diets using 32 conscientious objectors from Civilian Public Service as test subjects in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and eventually producing his two-volume Biology of Human Starvation (1950). His interest in diet and CVD was prompted, in part, by seemingly counterintuitive data: American business executives, presumably among the best-fed persons, had high rates of heart disease, while in post-war Europe, CVD rates had decreased sharply in the wake of reduced food supplies. Keys postulated a correlation between cholesterol levels and CVD and initiated a study of Minnesota businessmen (the first prospective study of CVD), culminating in what came to be known as the Seven Countries Study. These studies found strong associations between the CVD rate of a population and average serum cholesterol and per capita intake of saturated fatty acids.

From the early 1950s, Keys actively promoted his findings to an increasingly health-conscious public. The resulting "cholesterol controversy" revealed sharp divisions in post-war scientific culture over whether the statisticians' "strong associations" could provide scientific certainty. This controversy left greater opportunity for competing food industry groups, health promotion associations, food faddists, physicians, and insurance companies to use the ambiguities and methodological quibbles inherent in such studies to pursue their own agendas. In its simplest form, the debate over dietary fat and CVD pitted "interventionists" against those calling for further studies--preferably clinical or laboratory studies.

Keys was always considered an interventionist. He generally shunned food fads and vigorously promoted the benefits of "reasonably low-fat diets," instead of following "the North American habit for making the stomach the garbage disposal unit for a long list of harmful foods." Keys' studies and recommendations have had a substantial impact on changes in the U.S. diet and the resulting downward trend in CVD. Because of his influence in dietary science, Keys was featured on the cover of the January 13, 1961 issue of Time magazine.

Ancel Keys died peacefully of old age on November 20, 2004&mdash;two months before his 101st birthday.