[Shemp]

Ancel Keys research was flawed but that was because he didn't have much in the way of statistics to work with. He wasn't cherry picking and didn't have an agenda, at least initially. Doctors in WW2 noticed that Japanese (who ate a very lean diet then, with little meat and no dairy and very low saturated fat) had very clean arteries compared to Americans. It was also known that Finns had horrific incidence of heart disease. So Ancel Keys and other doctors speculated and saturated fat consumption stuck out as a differentiator. But it might have been pre-diabetes from excess sugar, which Americans have always eaten in large quantity. There was also the French paradox, since the French, like the Finns, eat huge amounts of saturated dairy fat but unlike the Finns, have little heart disease. My own view is that saturated fat is okay under certain circumstances, such as combined with lots of fruit or vegetables, for people not pre-diabetic. Cheese and salad or fresh apples washed down by red wine is safe, but pizza (cheese on white bread) washed down by coca cola is not, is what I believe currently.

As for red meat, my concern is the correlation with colon cancer and aging. BTW meat is not that high in saturated fat. Most of meat fat is monounsaturated. I eat meat when nothing else is available but I don't much care for it. My natural diet, the one I prefer and which is easiest to follow, is a Mediterranean diet, with olive oil replaced by 70% dark chocolate, lots of dairy and sardines but little meat.