A New Study Shows the American Heart Association Got Its Diet Recommendations Exactly Backwards

Despite having annual donations totaling over $800m, the AHA managed to rank the diet that many studies show most reduces heart disease risks as the worst diet for heart health.

In this post, I tell a story about the American Heart Association to illustrate just how broken mainstream nutrition messaging is. This story is an example of what caused me to want to write this Substack. Because I have so many new readers, I spend the second half of today’s letter highlighting some past posts about health. Finally, at the end there’s a “START HERE” guide for new fasters highlighting previous posts that support your fasting journey.

American Heart Association: Spending Hundreds of Millions to Get It All Wrong

Wouldn’t life make so much sense if we could trust an organization like the American Heart Association (AHA) to tell us what to eat to avoid heart disease? I wish we lived in such a world. But here’s the truth about the world we actually live in: the AHA’s guidelines are so backward that evidence shows that doing the opposite of the AHA’s guidelines is actually the best way to reduce your risk of heart disease.

I know this is an audacious statement so allow me to back it up.

In 2021, the AHA rated various diets here based on how heart-healthy they are. They ranked the DASH diet (which stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) as the best diet for heart health, and they ranked the keto diet (a very low-carb diet) as the worst diet for heart health.¹

The DASH diet emphasizes “vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, and low-fat dairy.”² It limits saturated fat, sodium, fatty meats, refined grains, added sugars, and alcohol. Because it limits saturated fat, it recommends instead “non-tropical oils.” That’s another way of telling people to eat those adorable highly refined industrial seed oils that no human ever consumed prior to about 150 years ago.

The DASH diet appears fine at first glance. But because it specifically limits fatty meats, it is in many ways opposite to the keto diet. Since most people don’t get the majority of their calories from vegetables, encouraging whole grains will inevitably lead to a high-carb diet. So what are the results of following one or the other of these opposite diets?

This randomized trial published May 2023 put 94 obese, diabetic, or hypertensive adults on either a very low-carb diet (keto) or the DASH diet for 4 months. Here are the results:

Compared with the DASH diet, the VLC [very low carb] diet led to greater improvement in estimated mean systolic blood pressure (−9.77 mm Hg vs −5.18 mm Hg; P = .046), greater improvement in glycated hemoglobin (−0.35% vs −0.14%; P = .034), and greater improvement in weight (−19.14 lb vs −10.34 lb; P = .0003).