For seventy years the public in the West was sold a fairy tale: eat less butter, fewer eggs, less red meat, and switch to "heart-healthy" margarine and vegetable oils and heart disease would vanish. The architect of that fairy tale was Ancel Keys, a biologist with no formal training in cardiology or epidemiology who cherry-picked six (later seven) countries for his famous 1958 "Seven Countries Study" while deliberately ignoring dozens of others that destroyed his correlation between saturated fat and heart disease. France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, nations swimming in cream, cheese, and pork fat, had some of the lowest rates of heart attack on the planet. Keys simply pretended they didn't exist.
The fraud was obvious even in the 1950s. British physiologist John Yudkin called it out in real time and was professionally buried for his trouble. The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968–1973), the most rigorous dietary trial ever conducted at the time, showed that replacing saturated fat with corn oil actually increased mortality — every 30 mg/dL reduction in serum cholesterol raised the risk of death by 22 %. The investigators hid the results for four decades. When they were finally exhumed in 2016, the headlines barely flickered.
Yet the zombie lives on. The 2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans still tell citizens to limit saturated fat to 10 % of calories and treat eggs like occasional treats. Meanwhile, heart disease remains the #1 killer of Americans (and Australians) — nearly 700,000 deaths per year — despite the fact that per-capita consumption of butter, lard, and red meat is at historic lows and seed-oil consumption has risen 1,000 % since 1900.
The lipid-heart hypothesis is not "controversial." It is falsified. Full stop.
So why are we still dying?
Because the real drivers of the modern cardiovascular pandemic were never cholesterol or steak. They are newer, man-made insults our genomes have never encountered in 300,000 years of human evolution. And the latest research points to a culprit so ubiquitous we literally breathe it: microplastics.
In March 2024, the New England Journal of Medicine dropped a bomb: patients with detectable microplastics and nanoplastics (MNPs) in their carotid-artery plaque had a 4.5-fold higher risk of myocardial infarction, stroke, or death over the next 34 months compared with patients whose plaques were plastic-free. The plastics found were polyethylene (the stuff in grocery bags) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), the same materials leaching from water bottles, food packaging, synthetic clothing, and crumbling infrastructure.
A follow-up animal study published in October 2025 went further. Researchers at the University of Campania in Italy exposed rats to environmentally relevant doses of polystyrene nanoplastics in their drinking water for 90 days. Result:
Massive accumulation of plastics inside arterial walls
Significant atherosclerotic plaque formation
Zero change in body weight or serum cholesterol
Strikingly, only male rats developed plaques — female rats were almost completely protected, hinting at an oestrogen-related mechanism
This is the smoking gun the lipid-heart crowd never had: a direct, dose-dependent cause of atherosclerosis that has nothing to do with LDL cholesterol.
We now know humans ingest roughly a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Autopsy studies find microplastics in human heart tissue, brain tissue, placenta, and breast milk. Blood levels in the general population are already in the microgram-per-millilitre range — the same concentrations that trigger inflammation and oxidative stress in laboratory models.
1.Industrial Seed Oils (Linoleic Acid Overload): The single biggest dietary change since 1900 is the replacement of animal fats with soybean, corn, cottonseed, and canola oils. Linoleic acid intake has tripled. These omega-6 fats are highly prone to oxidation, and oxidised linoleic acid metabolites (OXLAMs) are now found in every atherosclerotic plaque ever tested.
2.Chronic Hyperinsulinemia from Refined Carbohydrates: Insulin is the single strongest driver of endothelial dysfunction and de novo lipogenesis in the liver. The low-fat, high-carb diet prescribed since 1977 has produced the most insulin-resistant population in history.
3.Microplastics & Nanoplastics: Directly inflammatory to the endothelium, pro-thrombotic, and now proven to accumulate inside plaques.
4.Persistent Organic Pollutants (PFAS, phthalates, BPA/BPS): Forever chemicals disrupt steroid-hormone signalling and are found in 99 % of Americans.
5.Sleep Disruption & Circadian Misalignment: Shift work alone increases cardiovascular risk 40 %.
6.Sedentary Behaviour: Sitting more than 8 hours a day raises risk as much as smoking.
7.Glyphosate & Other Pesticides: Emerging evidence shows disruption of the shikimate pathway in gut microbes → impaired bile-acid metabolism → altered cholesterol transport.
Notice what is not on the list: dietary cholesterol and natural saturated fats.
Weston Price's 1939 masterpiece Nutrition and Physical Degeneration documented fourteen traditional societies — from the Inuit to the Maasai to the Swiss villagers of Lötschental — who ate enormous quantities of animal fat and cholesterol, yet had near-zero heart disease and perfect dental arches. The common denominators:
Zero refined carbohydrates
Zero industrial seed oils
Zero exposure to synthetic chemicals
High intake of fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, K2) from animal foods
Near-zero microplastic exposure (obviously)
When these same populations adopted white flour, sugar, and vegetable oils, heart disease and dental decay exploded within a single generation.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again commission has a once-in-a-century chance to do what the 1977 McGovern Committee should have done: throw out the failed low-fat experiment and start over with first-principles science.
Priorities should be:
1.Immediate removal of industrial seed oils from school lunches and federal food programs.
2.Funding for large-scale human trials comparing high-animal-fat, low-carb diets vs. the current Dietary Guidelines.
3.Nationwide monitoring of micro- and nanoplastic levels in blood and tissue.
4.Ban on PFAS and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals known to promote atherosclerosis.
5.Reintroduction of K2-rich foods (grass-fed butter, cheese, egg yolks, liver) into dietary recommendations.
The cholesterol hypothesis is not "still debated." It is a historical cautionary tale of captured science, industry money, and institutional inertia. The evidence is now overwhelming that natural saturated fats and dietary cholesterol are not only harmless, they are essential for hormone production, cell-membrane integrity, and vitamin absorption.
Meanwhile, the real killers are hiding in our water bottles, our non-stick pans, our synthetic fleece jackets, and the ultra-processed sludge that replaced real food.
The heart-disease epidemic was man-made. The good news? That means it can be man-unmade.
Eat like your great-grandparents, throw away the plastic cutting boards, and demand that the agencies that lied to us for seventy years finally tell the truth.