Drinking Juices For Heart Health — A Rebuttal

Oh, the irony

A few days ago, I ran across an article on Medium by a medical student who suggested that increasing one’s intake of fruit and vegetable juice in the diet would benefit the heart. His suggestion was based on the Diet-Heart Hypothesis, first offered by Ancel Keys.

A brief history of the Diet-Heart Hypothesis: Ancel Keys was a fish physiologist who gained some level of fame for developing the food rations GIs in WWII were given in the field — the K-Ration (the K was for Keys). Later, working with rabbits, Keys noticed that diets high in saturated animal fats caused the rabbits to die. Necropsies of the poor rabbits showed their arteries were clogged with a fatty substance. Certainly, with hindsight, this doesn’t seem surprising since rabbits have no means of metabolizing ingested animal fat. But at the time, Keys didn’t think too much about this fact and posited that the same thing happened in humans. At the time, Americans were dropping dead from Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) and it seems Keys wanted to be the Answer-Man for this national epidemic. He said that eating animal fat is what caused heart disease.

That the American diet hadn’t changed much from before heart attacks became so common also seems to have escaped Keys’ thinking, as did the fact that the incidence and prevalence of smoking rose sharply after WWII — right around the time heart disease was taking off.

Going beyond data from rabbits, Keys examined the diets of people from 22 countries and plotted the rate of death from degenerative heart disease versus the average percentage of total calories from fat in the diet. There was no obvious pattern in the 22 data points, so Keys tossed out all but 6 — he kept the 6 that supported his Diet-Heart Hypothesis and deleted the 16 that didn’t support his Hypothesis. Just to be clear, this is NOT how science works.

There is a lot more to the story, but that’s how the Diet-Heart Hypothesis was born — from a fraudulent report to the plan to save Americans from dying from heart disease. An important refinement Keys made was to suggest that it was the cholesterol, specifically, that was the culprit — and thus started the demonization of cholesterol (especially LDL — AKA “Bad Cholesterol”).

Enter the article suggesting we drink more juice. The author, John Quinonero, made the argument that by drinking more juice we can lower our LDL, and this, in turn, will lower our risk of heart disease.

I pointed out that the Diet-Heart Hypothesis was known to be wrong for decades, and, thus, his recommendation for drinking more juice was based on an incorrect hypothesis at best and could actually be harmful to those who followed the suggestion.

The author disagreed, as he had learned in one of his medical textbooks that a high level of LDL leads to heart disease. I offered this video for him to watch so he could get up to speed on the lack of a role LDL plays in heart disease, which to his credit, he watched:

[Unfortunately the original video I embedded is no longer available for free on YouTube… you missed a good one! This is the same guy, talking about the same topic, but not as entertaining…]

One of his main criticisms of the video was that the presenter took Keys to task for fraud, but only after Keys’ death — pointing out how he didn’t allow Keys to defend himself. I only mention this because, after a lengthy exchange of comments on his juice article, Mr Quinonero extracted five specific comments from that exchange, and attacked me, by name, in a new article. After my initial response to his attacks, Mr Quinonero muted me — effectively deleting my critical comments to both of his articles and not letting me respond to defend myself.

The main thrust of Mr Quinonero’s second article was to defend the Diet-Heart Hypothesis. My response — before I was muted — was to offer a second video that provides hard data refuting the Diet-Heart Hypothesis:

The video (https://youtu.be/LaDVuUpIFFc in case the embed isn’t working) contains a great quote from statistician John Tukey:

It’s better to solve the right problem approximately than to solve the wrong problem exactly.

If you watch the second video you will see how LDL (or cholesterol in general) is only the sign of a bigger metabolic problem that leads to a sick heart. It’s a tell-tale by-product of the root cause of heart disease. So, by lowering LDL, one is only covering up the sign that something else is going on. With this in mind, the suggestion of drinking more juice would at best lead to covering up the sign that someone has a metabolic issue that will likely lead to heart disease — the exact opposite of what Mr Quinonero suggests drinking juices will do. The author was correct that drinking juice will likely lower LDL,

It’s just that LDL isn’t the problem.

It’s the alert that something else, something bad, is going on— it is the indication that a real problem is present. Lowering LDL is like pulling the batteries out of a smoke detector.

The real problem is Insulin Resistance — a condition made worse by drinking a lot of juice. So in the author’s quest to offer a way to protect one’s heart, he offered a diet suggestion that very often leads to heart disease.

In his brief response to this new video (and other related information I included in my initial response), the author said he was sticking to what his textbook (which was first published in 1950) said, rather than accept that what he had learned in medical school was wrong. And I get that it must be hard to accept that the medical program you are taking on huge student debt to complete is at least 70 years behind the times on the topic of heart disease. He said he would review the materials I sent more closely, then proceeded to mute me…

I welcome discussion on this topic and will not mute anyone simply because they disagree with me. I am a researcher and I follow the data. My goal is to understand the truth — not just to defend what I currently think is true. If you have data that show my data are wrong, I want to see and evaluate those data. If my view is wrong, my ego is strong enough that I can change my view.

Thank you for reading this article — hopefully it contained something you found useful.

If you aren’t a member of Medium but are thinking of joining, please join through my page! If you do sign up to Medium through my page, some of your membership fee goes to me (but you still pay the normal membership price).

With a paid membership to Medium, you will get to read more of my work plus you get unlimited access to thousands of Medium writers. And it’s only about $5.00 a month!