If only researchers had completed that study

The headline on the story in Tuesday’s Washington Post read: “This study 40 years ago could have reshaped the American diet.”

All I could think of, as I shook my head in dismay, was “Nonfat cheese!”

The focus of the Post report was never-before-published data from a study, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, conducted in the late 1960s and early ’70s involving thousands of people. In this study, one group was fed a diet containing less saturated fat, less cholesterol and more vegetable oil, while the other group was fed a more typical American diet, namely one with more fat, including saturated fat.

The first diet was designed to lower blood cholesterol and reduce heart disease. The second diet was something of a control, the “bad” diet that would show, by contrast, the benefits of the lower-fat diet.

And, just as researchers expected, according to the Post, the special diet did reduce cholesterol in patients. And although it didn’t seem to have any effect on heart disease, researchers predicted that it would have if the experiment had continued.

If only it had continued. Researchers, reviewing the results of the massive trial today, find that the expected outcome of the heart-healthy diet never materialized. In fact, the patients who lowered their cholesterol by following that diet “actually suffered more heart-related deaths than those who did not.”

Looking back, analysts see a variety of reasons for why the results were not fully interpreted. The primary problem was that researchers back then didn’t have the computer technology we have today to dissect the data collected from the thousands of people involved in the study.

It also seems, however, that the researchers were influenced by the prevailing consensus at the time. Nutritional experts were convinced that consumption of fat, especially saturated fat, increased the risk of clogged arteries, heart disease and heart attacks – and they were determined to find the evidence that supported that theory.

The new analysis of this study indicates that if those in charge had only published all the research gleaned from the study 40 years ago, it might have changed dietary history. It might not have stopped the low-fat-diet movement in its tracks, but it might at least have injected some skepticism into the debate.

And it might have prevented the manufacture of non-fat cheese.

As someone with high blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels, I was a true believer in the low-fat diet in the 1970s and ’80s. I ate low-fat margarine, not butter. I drank skim milk. I ate lots of skinless chicken and turkey. And I snacked on low-sodium pretzels.

Because many millions of other people were following the same dietary guidelines, an entire industry evolved to create low-fat or non-fat foods that tasted something like the full-fat foods we loved. Thus, non-fat cheese.

This “cheese,” which came in cellophane packets like American cheese squares, resembled sheets of semi-pliable orange vinyl. I remember trying to construct a heart-healthy grilled cheese sandwich from the stuff.

I would put a shiny orange square between two pieces of thin-sliced, low-fat bread. I would put some low-fat margarine in a pan to lubricate the sandwich.

The so-called cheese didn’t actually melt. It just became a little more viscous, giving it sort of an oleaginous mouth feel. But it had absolutely no flavor – or at least no flavor resembling cheese.

Grocery shelves were chock full of low-fat cookies and desserts that also barely resembled the real thing. They were packed with sugar and carbohydrates, which seems insane now.

There were low-fat versions of hot dogs, sausage, even bacon. There was egg-free, non-fat mayonnaise. All of it was horrible.

But we ate it, thinking it was good for us, hoping against hope that someone would find a way to make low-fat alternatives taste like actual food.

If only those scientists running the Minnesota Coronary Experiment had seen the project through to the end, I could have eaten thousands more real grilled cheese sandwiches. With butter, too!

And, who knows, we all might have been healthier as a result.

This story was originally published April 15, 2016 at 2:41 PM with the headline "If only researchers had completed that study."