Heart of the Matter

Could microplastics be driving heart disease?

My new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is dropping in hardcover and aubiobook formats on December 16th, via Skyhorse. The book is about testosterone decline as a civilisational problem. It’s the first true hormonal theory of politics, drawing on cutting-edge science and the philosophy of great thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Francis Fukuyama and William James. The book can be preordered now directly via the Skyhorse website or from Amazon.

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I’m not the first person to call the “lipid-heart hypothesis”—the theory that consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat causes heart disease—the biggest medical scam of the last hundred years. Maybe of all time.

It’s the reason cholesterol is basically the most demonised substance in medicine, apart from tobacco. Although it’s actually been overturned and discredited for the most part now, the lipid-heart hypothesis still lives on, zombie-like, in medical textbooks, food advertising and popular consciousness. If I went to my doctor now and told him how many eggs and how much beef I eat a day, he’d probably be the one to have a heart attack—and not me.

The lipid-heart hypothesis was cooked up by a man called Angel Keys in the 1940s. I say “cooked up,” because I mean to be disparaging. It was known to be nonsense from the start. Keys was a man with no claim to authority in the emerging field of nutritional science except the fact he had helped design the famous K-ration during the War.

His colleagues laughed at him when he suggested saturated fat was the cause of rising rates of heart disease in the Western world and especially America. Keys had gerrymandered the data—picked countries that showed a correlation between saturated-fat consumption and heart disease rates and flat out ignored the many countries that didn’t—and his fellow researchers knew it. The French, for example, eat and always have ate prodigious quantities of butter: Why didn’t they have the highest rates of heart disease in the world?

Keys didn’t have an answer, but he did have big money from the margarine industry, which needed some cherrypicked science to show its perverted spreadable muck was better for you than the animal fats we’ve all been eating since the dawn of time.

The money went a long way. So did President Eisenhower’s heart attack in the White House a few years later, which made heart disease a national-security issue in need of a ready-made industry-backed theory of causation.

The theory was given a further presidential imprimatur in the mid-‘60s, when rising inflation was proving a headache for Lyndon B. Johnson. People were complaining especially about the price of eggs. So what did Johnson do? He told the Surgeon General to issue a warning about eating eggs because of their cholesterol content. Problem solved.

To this day, eggs remain the only food in the US ever to have had a specific health warning attached to their consumption.

Over decades, conflicting data—of which there were huge amounts—was simply ignored or swept under the rug. Look up the Minnesota Coronary Experiment from the 1970s. When this expensive piece of gold-standard double blind testing completely disconfirmed the lipid-heart hypothesis—it actually showed that reducing cholesterol in your diet is more not less likely to kill you—the scientists threw the whole thing in the bin, where it remained for 30 years till some other scientists fished it out.

The lipid-heart hypothesis and its advocates promised us renewed health, the end of heart disease, if we just stopped eating eggs, bacon and buttered toast for breakfast and ate more plants and “heart healthy” fats like vegetable and seed oils. Of course, that didn’t happen. Yes, we abandoned eggs, bacon and butter, and increased the amounts of novel plant-based fats in our diets, but look at us now. We’re the unhealthiest we’ve ever been, and it’s only getting worse. Heart disease, far from disappearing, is now the leading cause of death in the US, killing 2,500 people a day.

Things could have been very different. In his 1939 book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston A. Price showed that the healthiest societies around the world, whether in sub-Arctic Canada or Subsaharan Africa, prioritised nutrient-dense animal foods over all others. Foods like organ meat and fatty cuts, shellfish, eggs and dairy—foods rich in protein but also fats and, of course, cholesterol.

How different the history of the last hundred years might have been if Price’s book, and not the junk science of Angel Keys, had become the foundation of nutritional science. If we had paid attention to what the healthiest, most vibrant people actually ate, instead of believing industry-backed studies could tell us what nature, tradition and our own bodies had been telling us for hundreds of thousands of years.

Would the Make America Healthy Again crusade even be necessary now? Maybe not; although it’s not just changes to our diets that are making us all so ill. We’re exposed to toxic chemicals, to blue light, to electromagnetic radiation, to stress in ways that are totally novel in our history as a species.

Still, thanks to Make America Healthy Again, the Department of Health and Human Services is well placed to investigate the real causes of heart disease. Note the plural there: I think it’s far more likely there are multiple causes or aggravating factors at play.

One of them appears to be microplastics, those ubiquitous tiny little pieces of plastics we keep hearing more and more about.

Now a new study suggests a clear link between exposure to microplastics and the arterial plaques that cause heart disease.