Latest / Revisionist History / The Basement Tapes

Transcript

The Basement Tapes · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin right out of the blue.
0:24
Speaker 2: Out of the blue, and what does he say?
0:27
Speaker 1: He says, doctor Franz, I've heard the possibility that there
0:32
Speaker 1: might be some very interesting data in your father's basement.
0:37
Speaker 2: I'm talking to Robert Frantz, a cardiologist at the Mayo
0:40
Speaker 2: Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, about a phone call he'd got
0:44
Speaker 2: not long ago from a man named Chris Ramsden. He
0:47
Speaker 2: had a question for Robert Frantz about his father.
0:50
Speaker 1: My parents lived in the same house for over fifty years,
0:54
Speaker 1: and essentially my father passed and then my mother was
0:58
Speaker 1: living and assisted living.
1:00
Speaker 2: The house was empty. The family hadn't gotten around to
1:03
Speaker 2: selling it.
1:04
Speaker 1: So we just sort of left it. Nobody was necessarily
1:06
Speaker 1: living in it, but it was there. And so when
1:09
Speaker 1: Chris said there might be something in the basement of interest.
1:13
Speaker 2: I feel like every great Midwestern detective story begins with
1:16
Speaker 2: the line there might be something in the basement of interest.
1:20
Speaker 1: I had some concern because the joke in our family
1:25
Speaker 1: was that if we ever need to sell that house,
1:28
Speaker 1: we should just call the Air Force and call in
1:30
Speaker 1: a n apalm strike. There were files that had every
1:35
Speaker 1: paper that my father had ever published, and every PhD
1:39
Speaker 1: thesis that he'd ever reviewed. And he was also an
1:42
Speaker 1: amateur radio operator and he built his own radios. He
1:46
Speaker 1: handwound his own coils and built his own receivers, and
1:50
Speaker 1: so there's all this radio stuff down there. So there
1:54
Speaker 1: was a lot of stuff in that basement.
1:56
Speaker 2: When Chris called, my name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
2:03
Speaker 2: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
2:14
Speaker 2: This episode is the final episode of the season, season two.
2:19
Speaker 2: It's a medical mystery, a detective story about a long
2:22
Speaker 2: forgotten scientific study, a study with a crucial clue. I
2:28
Speaker 2: left this episode to the last for a reason because
2:31
Speaker 2: it is also, in many ways, the most personal of
2:34
Speaker 2: this year's stories. And it was Robert Franz who got
2:37
Speaker 2: me thinking about all this. I didn't meet Robert Franz
2:50
Speaker 2: in person. I was just calling him to clarify a
2:53
Speaker 2: few questions from another story I was working on. The
2:55
Speaker 2: previous episode, in fact, the one about French Fries. It
2:59
Speaker 2: wasn't worth flying all the way to Minnesota for this
3:01
Speaker 2: one interview. I thought I was at my parents' home
3:04
Speaker 2: in Canada and preoccupied. I actually conducted the interview with
3:08
Speaker 2: France in my rental car on my cell phone with
3:11
Speaker 2: my little tape recorder on the dashboard, with someone in
3:14
Speaker 2: Minnesota recording Robert France's end of the conversation. But now
3:18
Speaker 2: I wish I'd met him face to face, because I
3:21
Speaker 2: found what he had to say about the obligation of
3:24
Speaker 2: a son to his father to be unexpectedly beautiful. How
3:28
Speaker 2: hard was it for you to find what he was
3:30
Speaker 2: looking for?
3:31
Speaker 1: Well, their home is about ninety miles from where I
3:35
Speaker 1: live down here in Rochester at the mail clinic, And
3:38
Speaker 1: so what I did is I would drive up there
3:40
Speaker 1: after work and spend a couple hours in the evening
3:44
Speaker 1: looking around and going through files. And I did that
3:48
Speaker 1: three or four times before I actually found the files
3:51
Speaker 1: that were of interest. And on that third or fourth time,
3:55
Speaker 1: I really came to truly one of the back corners
3:57
Speaker 1: of the basement, and there was a moldering, old cardboard
4:01
Speaker 1: box there that I opened up, and I just immediately
4:05
Speaker 1: thought to myself, Eureka, I have found.
4:08
Speaker 2: It Robert Franz's father. The man who left the box
4:16
Speaker 2: in the basement was Ivan Franz Junior, born in Smithville,
4:20
Speaker 2: West Virginia, in nineteen sixteen. He was slender and upright,
4:24
Speaker 2: with a magnificent head of hair, which he kept all
4:26
Speaker 2: his life. He flew planes, tinkered with radios, played the clarinet.
4:32
Speaker 2: He wrote his scientific paper's long hand, sitting at the
4:35
Speaker 2: dining room table in immaculate handwriting on yellow legal pads, pencil, eraser,
4:40
Speaker 2: pencil sharpener, all just so he was precise, punctual. Neither
4:45
Speaker 2: of his parents had finished high school. He ended up
4:47
Speaker 2: getting a degree from Harvard Medical School and then taught
4:50
Speaker 2: for thirty four years at the University of Minnesota. Ivan
4:55
Speaker 2: France was one of those unstoppable smart kids from the provinces.
5:00
Speaker 2: Not long before his death, Ivan Franz was interviewed for
5:03
Speaker 2: the university's archives.
5:05
Speaker 3: I made the final decision to go to medical school
5:10
Speaker 3: when I was a freshman in high school.
5:14
Speaker 4: That's a story I'd like to hear.
5:16
Speaker 3: And how did I decide to do that?
5:19
Speaker 5: Well.
5:19
Speaker 3: I noticed how my parents felt about people, and the
5:25
Speaker 3: only people that I could see that they really respected
5:29
Speaker 3: were the Baptist preacher and the physician that took care
5:34
Speaker 3: of them. I knew I would never make it as
5:37
Speaker 3: a preacher.
5:40
Speaker 2: I'd run this whole interview if I could.
5:42
Speaker 3: I had another decision at that point too, that I
5:45
Speaker 3: was offered a chance to play in a band in
5:49
Speaker 3: a cruise ship going between New York and Livermore, and
5:57
Speaker 3: at the same time the chemistry department asked me to
6:00
Speaker 3: do a little research project in the summer, saying, there again,
6:06
Speaker 3: I made the wrong decision with the counsels department.
6:11
Speaker 5: I see you never got to play the clarinet then
6:13
Speaker 5: for rich people on the luxury ship.
6:16
Speaker 3: No, what a loss to music. Yeah.
6:23
Speaker 2: Ivan France did not end up on cruise ships. He
6:26
Speaker 2: chose instead to devote his life to studying heart disease,
6:30
Speaker 2: specifically to understanding the role of cholesterol and blood lipids
6:34
Speaker 2: in heart attacks. He took his research seriously. Robert Franz
6:38
Speaker 2: says that his father raised his five boys according to
6:41
Speaker 2: the best practices of nutritional science.
6:43
Speaker 1: My dad would occasionally come home and say, hey, let's
6:46
Speaker 1: look at the lipids and the family and we'd line
6:49
Speaker 1: up and my mom would draw our blood because she
6:52
Speaker 1: felt she was better at it than my father, and
6:54
Speaker 1: he'd bring it down to the lab and look at
6:56
Speaker 1: our lipid profiles.
6:57
Speaker 2: You don't remember your lipid profile, do you, Well.
7:00
Speaker 1: They're always pretty good, you know, because I think from
7:03
Speaker 1: an early stage, my family tended to eat a low
7:08
Speaker 1: saturated fa diet. I remember a day when my dad
7:12
Speaker 1: brought back a piece of something that was the first
7:18
Speaker 1: efforts at making something like supposed to taste like steak
7:22
Speaker 1: or hamburg er, but was actually had no meat in it.
7:26
Speaker 1: And so these early efforts were foisted upon us, and
7:30
Speaker 1: we did our best to help my father to understand
7:33
Speaker 1: that making something it tastes like meat that isn't meat
7:35
Speaker 1: is not going to be an easy thing to do.
7:37
Speaker 4: You were his guinea pigs, well, in a.
7:39
Speaker 1: Way, we were, and I think it's true that he
7:41
Speaker 1: would have these ideas about things and say, well, let's
7:44
Speaker 1: try this. It's not really meat, but it's supposed to
7:47
Speaker 1: taste like meat, and maybe this is a way we
7:49
Speaker 1: can try to reduce our saturated fat intake.
7:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, did he weigh in on He sounds like he
7:55
Speaker 2: must have weighed in on what the family should be eating.
7:58
Speaker 1: We basically ate a lot of vegetables, you know, like
8:01
Speaker 1: lightly steamed broccoli with some lemon and pepper on it
8:04
Speaker 1: or something, and maybe a little bit of margarine.
8:11
Speaker 2: In the nineteen sixties, Robert's father decided he'd gone as
8:15
Speaker 2: far as he could in answering technical questions about the
8:17
Speaker 2: way in which Gleustro was sit theesized by the body.
8:20
Speaker 2: He wanted to do something more practical or useful, so
8:24
Speaker 2: he ran an idea by the head of the Heart
8:26
Speaker 2: Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
8:29
Speaker 3: This guy that wasn't ahead of that down there used
8:34
Speaker 3: to come up and visit me once in a while
8:37
Speaker 3: to see if I was doing what I was supposed
8:40
Speaker 3: to do with NIH. My he he wanted to play chess,
8:45
Speaker 3: so every time he would come up here, we'd have
8:47
Speaker 3: to get together in the evening and play chess fair enough.
8:54
Speaker 3: So I was starting to become a common old boys network,
8:57
Speaker 3: and I told him that I thought that that was
9:00
Speaker 3: something that the NIH should do, was to organize a
9:05
Speaker 3: big study in the general population to find out if
9:09
Speaker 3: there really was a relationship between diet, cholesterol and hard disease.
9:18
Speaker 2: Let's take a step backwards for a moment, because you
9:21
Speaker 2: can't understand the importance of what France was suggesting and
9:24
Speaker 2: why the basement tapes would ultimately matter so much until
9:28
Speaker 2: you understand how scientists usually study diet. There are lots
9:31
Speaker 2: of ways to analyze the effect that diet has on health.
9:35
Speaker 2: You can do an observational study, for example, identify tens
9:39
Speaker 2: of thousands of people, have them fill out a questionnaire
9:41
Speaker 2: on their diet at regular intervals over many years. Then
9:44
Speaker 2: keep track of when they die and what they die of,
9:47
Speaker 2: and look for patterns. That's what an epidemiological study is.
9:52
Speaker 2: France had a colleague at the University of Minnesota named
9:54
Speaker 2: Ansel Keys who conducted maybe the most famous epidemiological study
9:58
Speaker 2: of diet and health in history. For twenty five years.
10:02
Speaker 2: Keys collected data on about twelve thousand middle aged men
10:05
Speaker 2: in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Japan and the United States,
10:11
Speaker 2: and he came to the conclusion that the people eating
10:14
Speaker 2: what he called a Mediterranean diet lots of fish, vegetables,
10:17
Speaker 2: olive oil, and very little saturated fat, those people had
10:21
Speaker 2: the fewest heart attacks. Keys was massively influential. The problem
10:30
Speaker 2: is epidemiological studies are really tricky. For example, in France,
10:34
Speaker 2: people eat lots of butter and cheese and things cooked
10:37
Speaker 2: in fat, yet they have really low rates of heart disease.
10:41
Speaker 2: France was not included in the seven country study. Would
10:44
Speaker 2: Ansel Keys's results have been different? If he'd added France
10:47
Speaker 2: and done an eight country study. With epidemiological studies, you
10:52
Speaker 2: can get in real trouble if you pick the wrong populations.
10:55
Speaker 2: And how does Keys know that it's all the olive
10:57
Speaker 2: oil and fish and vegetables of the Mediterranean diet that
11:00
Speaker 2: make people from those places live so long. He's noticed
11:04
Speaker 2: an association between that diet and good health, but an
11:08
Speaker 2: epidemial logical study can't prove causation. Many years later, another
11:14
Speaker 2: researcher went back and reanalyzed Keys data and showed that
11:17
Speaker 2: people's consumption of sugar was a much better predictor of
11:21
Speaker 2: their health than their consumption of saturated fat. The only
11:25
Speaker 2: way around these problems is to do a controlled clinical trial,
11:30
Speaker 2: a study where you gather together two large groups of
11:32
Speaker 2: people who you think are identical on every variable you
11:35
Speaker 2: can imagine, age, weight, lifestyle, social class. Have one group
11:40
Speaker 2: eat their normal diet and have the other eat something
11:43
Speaker 2: you think is way healthier, and then follow them for
11:45
Speaker 2: years and see what happens. That's what Ivan Frantz suggests
11:51
Speaker 2: to his friend from the National Institutes of Health, and.
11:54
Speaker 3: He said, well, that's very interesting, because I have a
11:57
Speaker 3: summer message from a couple of other people who will
12:01
Speaker 3: just do that.
12:02
Speaker 2: The result was the National Diet Heart Study, a massive
12:06
Speaker 2: undertaking starting in the early nineteen sixties one hundred thousand
12:10
Speaker 2: people Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Oakland, and eventually Minnesota. France faced
12:17
Speaker 2: a challenge, though even clinical trials are not perfect, because
12:21
Speaker 2: how can you be sure that the group chosen to
12:23
Speaker 2: eat the normal diet doesn't start to eat healthier on
12:26
Speaker 2: their own overtime, or that the people chosen to eat
12:29
Speaker 2: healthy keep to their diet. How do you know they
12:32
Speaker 2: aren't sneaking big slices of chocolate cake every night. So
12:36
Speaker 2: alone among the participants in the National Diet Heart Study,
12:39
Speaker 2: Ivan France goes one step further because he's mister meticulous.
12:44
Speaker 2: He says, for my portion of the study in Minnesota,
12:47
Speaker 2: I'm going to use people who are living in an institution,
12:51
Speaker 2: so I know exactly what they're eating.
12:53
Speaker 3: Well, what I finally decided though, on was the school
12:57
Speaker 3: for people with low IQs down Ferrebou. Yes. So everybody
13:03
Speaker 3: else wanted to do it in the open population, and
13:06
Speaker 3: I said, well, you get a lot better control it
13:09
Speaker 3: in the close population. And so what they finally did
13:12
Speaker 3: was let me do it the way I wanted to,
13:15
Speaker 3: and the other five people do it in the open population.
13:19
Speaker 2: The patients in France's study would go for their meals
13:22
Speaker 2: in the cafeteria and get one of two trays. They'd
13:25
Speaker 2: look completely identical, so nobody knew what side of the
13:28
Speaker 2: experiment they were on. The term researchers used for that
13:32
Speaker 2: is double blind. But one tray was food cooked with
13:35
Speaker 2: vegetable oil and everything low fat. The other had everything
13:38
Speaker 2: cooked in saturated fat. Once I got butter, once I
13:42
Speaker 2: got margarine, And even that little detail France made perfect.
13:46
Speaker 3: At that time, there was a law in Minnesota that
13:51
Speaker 3: margarine had to be cut in triangles. I remember that.
13:56
Speaker 3: Remember that, sure so would look as good as the
13:59
Speaker 3: little butter. That was a big problem for me in
14:04
Speaker 3: my institutional study because that would have racked my double
14:09
Speaker 3: Aha and so funny you think I did about that?
14:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're a bright fellow.
14:18
Speaker 3: What did you do? I got a little wall pass
14:22
Speaker 3: the legislature. Let me cut my margins from the squares.
14:33
Speaker 2: Like I said, mystery meticulous.
14:37
Speaker 3: This was a beautiful organized study. There was lots of
14:40
Speaker 3: money and nothing. No holes were barre to try to
14:45
Speaker 3: do a good job.
14:47
Speaker 2: The Minnesota portion of the heart study took years to
14:50
Speaker 2: set up. It involved six different mental hospitals around Minnesota
14:55
Speaker 2: and one nursing home for a total of more than
14:57
Speaker 2: nine thousand research subjects. It ran for five years from
15:01
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight to nineteen seventy three, with a long
15:05
Speaker 2: follow up period. To this day, it stands as one
15:08
Speaker 2: of the most rigorous diet trials ever conducted.
15:12
Speaker 1: The different state hospitals where this project was conducted were
15:16
Speaker 1: scattered around Minnesota, and so my father would he actually
15:20
Speaker 1: had a small airplane, was a private pilot, and would
15:24
Speaker 1: this puddle jump around from one little place to another,
15:28
Speaker 1: troubleshooting these issues. It consumed his life and he sort
15:33
Speaker 1: of rarely took vacation and was always working on something,
15:35
Speaker 1: and it was just that what he wanted to do.
15:38
Speaker 2: Really, So what does the Minnesota study show, Well, that
15:43
Speaker 2: was the problem. The patients on the vegetable oil diet
15:46
Speaker 2: did end up with lower cholesterol than the people who
15:48
Speaker 2: ate food cooked with animal fats. That part worked according
15:52
Speaker 2: to expectation, but the vegetable oil people didn't live longer,
15:57
Speaker 2: which made no sense. They were eating the kind of
15:59
Speaker 2: diet everyone believed should help you live longer. Ivan France
16:03
Speaker 2: brought in a graduate student named Steve Brosty to help
16:06
Speaker 2: crunch the data. Brosty remembers everyone just be baffled.
16:10
Speaker 5: And they were hoping that with some new statistical techniques
16:13
Speaker 5: that had just come out, that they might be able
16:15
Speaker 5: to either understand why the results came out the way
16:19
Speaker 5: they did, or perhaps after some adjustments for various explanatory factors,
16:24
Speaker 5: that maybe the results would change.
16:27
Speaker 2: The results didn't change. When Brosty talked to Ivan Franz,
16:32
Speaker 2: France just shook his head.
16:33
Speaker 5: I remember him just expressing his bewilderment at how this
16:39
Speaker 5: could possibly have happened.
16:45
Speaker 2: Brosty wrote up his results for his master's thesis, but
16:48
Speaker 2: he never published it. In nineteen eighty nine, fifteen years
16:52
Speaker 2: after the Minnesota experiment ended, Ivan France finally published his results,
16:57
Speaker 2: but the paper was vague and didn't really go into detail,
17:01
Speaker 2: as if after thinking it over for fifteen years, he
17:03
Speaker 2: still couldn't make sense of what happened. This was a
17:06
Speaker 2: man who never ate butter who regularly checked the lipid
17:10
Speaker 2: levels of his children's blood. This was what he believed.
17:13
Speaker 2: In to test that belief, he spent years and millions
17:17
Speaker 2: of dollars designing the perfect clinical trial, perfect one step
17:21
Speaker 2: beyond everyone else in the National Diet Heart Study. And
17:25
Speaker 2: after all that the results were equivocal, he put a
17:30
Speaker 2: box full of all of his old data in his basement.
17:33
Speaker 2: Because he didn't believe in throwing anything out. He retired.
17:36
Speaker 2: He died in two thousand and nine, and his study
17:39
Speaker 2: was all but forgotten for a quarter century until Ivan
17:43
Speaker 2: Franz's son Robert, got a call out of the blue
17:46
Speaker 2: from Christopher Ramsden.
17:48
Speaker 4: It's pretty fun to try and track down missing data,
17:51
Speaker 4: so one clue led to another.
17:53
Speaker 2: Christopher Ramsden is a researcher at the National Institutes of Health.
17:57
Speaker 2: For seven years, he served as a Lieutenant commander in
18:00
Speaker 2: the Commissioned Corps of the US Public Health Service. He
18:03
Speaker 2: comes to the field of diet research from a different
18:06
Speaker 2: perspective than the majority of his peers. Ivan Frantz or
18:10
Speaker 2: Enseil Keys were interested in the effects of saturated fats.
18:14
Speaker 2: If you eat lots of butter, what happens to you?
18:17
Speaker 2: Ramsden is interested in the effects of the thing we
18:19
Speaker 2: are replacing butter with vegetable oils corn oil, sunflower oil,
18:24
Speaker 2: grape seed oil, canola oil, margarine. These are probably unsaturated fats,
18:29
Speaker 2: and they're all rich in something called linolaic acid.
18:32
Speaker 4: So for perspective, if you were to eat corn, you know,
18:36
Speaker 4: corn is about one percent of it by weight is fat,
18:41
Speaker 4: Whereas if you eat corn oil, it's one hundred percent
18:44
Speaker 4: of fat, and about fifty five to sixty percent of
18:47
Speaker 4: that is one compound linelaic acid. So I kind of
18:52
Speaker 4: view things like corn oil as kind of a cross
18:55
Speaker 4: between a food and a dietary supplement.
18:58
Speaker 2: Human beings need at least some linelaic acid for nutritional purposes,
19:02
Speaker 2: but in our attempt to keep our hearts healthier, we've
19:05
Speaker 2: essentially started to put vegetable oils in everything. Ramsen estimates
19:10
Speaker 2: that up until one hundred years ago, human beings would
19:12
Speaker 2: have gotten roughly two to three percent of their calories
19:15
Speaker 2: from linelaic acid. Now we're eating three, four, even five
19:19
Speaker 2: times that much. And the thing about linelaic acid is
19:23
Speaker 2: it's not benign. It builds up in certain tissues, it
19:26
Speaker 2: may play a role in inflammation. So what does it
19:29
Speaker 2: mean that we've suddenly decided to consume large quantities of
19:32
Speaker 2: something so problematic?
19:34
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's fair to say we're performing sort
19:37
Speaker 4: of an uncontrolled human experiment.
19:40
Speaker 2: Ramsen wanted some way to compare the health of people
19:42
Speaker 2: who eat lots of linelaic acid with people who eat
19:45
Speaker 2: a traditional diet of almost no linelaic acid. But what
19:49
Speaker 2: was he going to do? Somehow convinced the government to
19:52
Speaker 2: give him hundreds of millions of dollars for the study
19:55
Speaker 2: and then find thousands of people willing to turn their
19:58
Speaker 2: diets upside down. Then he realizes, wait, those studies have
20:02
Speaker 2: already been done. In all of the mountains of data
20:06
Speaker 2: collected half a century ago in the name of studying cholesterol,
20:09
Speaker 2: there should be an answer to the linelaic acid question.
20:13
Speaker 2: Ramsden first comes across something called the Sydney Diet Heart Study,
20:17
Speaker 2: the Australian counterpart to the big heart studies that were
20:20
Speaker 2: going on in the United States at the same time.
20:22
Speaker 2: He needs the raw data, but the studies main authors
20:25
Speaker 2: are long dead. One of the research assistants on the project, though,
20:29
Speaker 2: is still alive. Ramsen tracks him down. I think you
20:33
Speaker 2: know what happens next.
20:39
Speaker 4: So these data were actually in the house, I believe
20:42
Speaker 4: in the attic of influencing Lelar Thapen, who was a
20:47
Speaker 4: research assistant at the time of the study, who went
20:49
Speaker 4: on to have a prominent career and got his PhD
20:53
Speaker 4: and luckily had the foresight to hold on to this
20:56
Speaker 4: nine track magnetic tape.
21:00
Speaker 2: The attic tapes are exactly what Ramsden is looking for,
21:04
Speaker 2: but the Sydney study is small, four hundred and fifty
21:07
Speaker 2: eight people, all middle aged men, and it wasn't done
21:10
Speaker 2: in a controlled environment. That's when Ramsden calls Robert Franz
21:15
Speaker 2: and asks him to go rooting through his father's files
21:18
Speaker 2: to get his hands on the Minnesota experiment, the mother
21:21
Speaker 2: of all diet studies.
21:23
Speaker 1: You know, at a certain point universities make a decision
21:26
Speaker 1: to throw things out that they think are just taking
21:29
Speaker 1: up space and nobody's going to do anything with them anymore,
21:32
Speaker 1: and what's the value in preserving all these old things?
21:35
Speaker 1: And so it turns out that my father felt that
21:39
Speaker 1: was just a huge mistake, that why would you ever
21:42
Speaker 1: throw away the raw data?
21:45
Speaker 2: And sure enough, there they were on magnetic tapes in
21:49
Speaker 2: a moldering box in the back of the France basement.
21:56
Speaker 2: Chris must have been sharing with you the results that
21:59
Speaker 2: they were doing the work. How actively he engaged with you?
22:02
Speaker 2: Was he when he was working through the data?
22:04
Speaker 1: Well, when they started getting to a point where they
22:06
Speaker 1: had kind of dug this analysis of the people who
22:12
Speaker 1: had been on the diet for more than a year
22:15
Speaker 1: and who were over sixty five, which was then showing
22:20
Speaker 1: a trend towards this finding that the more their cholesterol
22:23
Speaker 1: was lowered, the higher the risk of an adverse outcome.
22:27
Speaker 2: Adverse outcome the great medical euphemism for death.
22:32
Speaker 1: Then he called me up and says, Bob, this is
22:35
Speaker 1: a little controversial, perhaps because it's suggesting that there might
22:41
Speaker 1: actually be an adverse effect in some of these people
22:44
Speaker 1: of this diet.
22:46
Speaker 2: With the basement tapes, Ramsden could now drill down into
22:49
Speaker 2: the specifics of the trial, and what he found was
22:52
Speaker 2: that people over sixty five, the most vulnerable people in
22:56
Speaker 2: the experiment, were dying faster if they ate a so
22:59
Speaker 2: called healthy diet. The reanalysis of the Sydney trial, by
23:03
Speaker 2: the way, reached the same conclusion vegetable oil lowers your cholesterol,
23:08
Speaker 2: which is, of course it's a good thing. But now
23:10
Speaker 2: Ramsden had two bits of evidence showing that all that
23:13
Speaker 2: extra linelaic acid seemed to be doing something else, something
23:17
Speaker 2: that more than canceled out all the other benefits of
23:20
Speaker 2: vegetable oil. If you listened to the previous episode of
23:27
Speaker 2: revisionist History, you heard me complaining about how McDonald's ruined
23:31
Speaker 2: French fries. They used to cook them in animal fat
23:34
Speaker 2: and they were divine, but then in nineteen ninety they
23:37
Speaker 2: switched to frying them in vegetable oils, and that's why
23:40
Speaker 2: they now taste like cardboard. We had to give up
23:43
Speaker 2: on one of the most delicious foods ever because we
23:45
Speaker 2: were told it was better for us. Healthier saturated fats
23:50
Speaker 2: were bad. Look in your kitchen. Look at how much
23:52
Speaker 2: vegetable oil you have in your cupboard. Your ancestors did
23:55
Speaker 2: not have big bottles of corn oil lying around. But
23:59
Speaker 2: now Ramsden comes along and says, wait a minute, the
24:02
Speaker 2: basement tape suggests that stuff is not so healthy after all.
24:06
Speaker 2: Linilaic acid might be a real problem. Let me just
24:12
Speaker 2: read to you from the conclusion of Ramsden's research article
24:15
Speaker 2: on the Minnesota study. It's in the British Medical Journal.
24:19
Speaker 2: And remember that this is a super cautious scientist speaking
24:23
Speaker 2: in the final paragraphs of a peer reviewed research paper
24:26
Speaker 2: that was probably rewritten and rewritten ten times to tone
24:29
Speaker 2: it down as much as possible. It concludes available evidence
24:34
Speaker 2: from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat
24:39
Speaker 2: with linnoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol, but does not
24:45
Speaker 2: support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk
24:48
Speaker 2: of death from cornerary heart disease or all causes. He's saying,
24:54
Speaker 2: there's no good evidence that reducing saturated fat makes you
24:57
Speaker 2: live longer. The best clinical trials we have reached the
25:01
Speaker 2: opposite conclusion. That's why Ramsden calls up Ivan Franz's son
25:06
Speaker 2: before he publishes his findings.
25:08
Speaker 1: He has to, so he said, how do you feel
25:12
Speaker 1: about that? This could be a little bit sensitive for
25:14
Speaker 1: you because this is your father's life work, and maybe
25:17
Speaker 1: in some situations it didn't actually have a neutral effect.
25:22
Speaker 1: Perhaps it wasn't even good for people.
25:25
Speaker 2: It's not a trivial issue for either man, is it.
25:28
Speaker 2: Ramsden is challenging fifty years of medical orthodoxy, and he'd
25:32
Speaker 2: enlisted the son of the very men who helped create
25:35
Speaker 2: that orthodoxy. Ramsen tells Robert Franz, I am about to
25:40
Speaker 2: call in to question your father's life's work, to show
25:44
Speaker 2: that something he believed in his whole career perhaps wasn't
25:47
Speaker 2: that good for people. How do you feel about that?
25:51
Speaker 2: Which means have I made you complicit in the betrayal
25:55
Speaker 2: of your own father? And what does France say? This
25:59
Speaker 2: is the heart of it. Franz says, no, I'm not
26:03
Speaker 2: betraying my father. If my father were alive, he would
26:07
Speaker 2: have done the same thing, rummaged through his basement and
26:11
Speaker 2: given you the same computer tapes.
26:13
Speaker 1: I think my father would be very pleased, because that's science, right.
26:17
Speaker 1: You have a hypothesis, you try to test it. Maybe
26:20
Speaker 1: it's dogmnt breaking, maybe it's not. And if things go
26:24
Speaker 1: a different direction, then you've got to try to explain
26:27
Speaker 1: that my father was a humble man. You know, he
26:33
Speaker 1: would not be quick to take a lot of credit
26:37
Speaker 1: for things.
26:41
Speaker 2: Ivan France had a set of beliefs opinions. He thought
26:45
Speaker 2: you lived longer if you lowered your cholesterol. He thought
26:48
Speaker 2: that a healthy diet was one rich in vegetable oils
26:51
Speaker 2: and low in saturated fats. He believed in margarine and
26:54
Speaker 2: not butter. Those were the beliefs that drove his research agenda.
26:59
Speaker 2: But what Robert Franz is talking about when he says
27:02
Speaker 2: my father was a humble man is something far more
27:05
Speaker 2: crucial than belief. He's talking about his father's prince the
27:10
Speaker 2: foundation of his father's thinking. Ivan Franz's foundational principle was humility.
27:17
Speaker 2: He was fully prepared to accept at any given moment
27:20
Speaker 2: that his beliefs might not be right and that he
27:23
Speaker 2: might not know the answer. In helping to prove his
27:29
Speaker 2: father wrong, the son was upholding his father's memory. When
27:34
Speaker 2: I interviewed Robert Franz, I had just lost my father
27:37
Speaker 2: three days before. That's why I was at home in Canada.
27:41
Speaker 2: I was going to cancel the interview, but in the
27:44
Speaker 2: end that seemed as much trouble as doing it. So
27:47
Speaker 2: I sat in my rental car on my cell phone,
27:50
Speaker 2: and as Robert Franz talked about his father, it seemed
27:54
Speaker 2: to me that he was describing my father as well.
27:57
Speaker 2: Graham Morris, Leslie Gladwell, an academic, a mathematician, slender, a
28:03
Speaker 2: full head of hair. He would sit at his desk
28:06
Speaker 2: at home and write his mathematics papers in elegant longhanir
28:09
Speaker 2: and pencil eraser all just so. Maybe if my father
28:14
Speaker 2: hadn't just died, I wouldn't have made that connection. But
28:18
Speaker 2: then and there it seemed inescapable and the more I listened,
28:22
Speaker 2: the more I realized that France was talking about things
28:25
Speaker 2: that I had been thinking about as well. What is
28:29
Speaker 2: a child's obligation to his parent? I took my father's
28:35
Speaker 2: presence for granted for as long as he was alive,
28:38
Speaker 2: and when he died, the first shocking realization was that
28:41
Speaker 2: I had to find a way to keep him alive
28:43
Speaker 2: in my heart, to honor his memory. How do we
28:48
Speaker 2: do that? Not by honoring our parents beliefs. We are
28:52
Speaker 2: different people than they are, born in different eras, shaped
28:57
Speaker 2: by different forces. What we are obliged to honor in
29:01
Speaker 2: our parents is their principles, the rules by which they
29:05
Speaker 2: lived their lives. That's what I found so beautiful in
29:14
Speaker 2: Robert Franz's act, The busy professional, a doctor at one
29:18
Speaker 2: of the most prestigious medical centers in the world, drove
29:22
Speaker 2: ninety miles each way four times to spend hours alone
29:26
Speaker 2: in a cluttered basement looking for a box of tapes
29:29
Speaker 2: that would end up proving that his father was wrong.
29:34
Speaker 2: And why did he do it? Because he understood that
29:37
Speaker 2: in pushing the science forward, in defiance of ego and preconception,
29:42
Speaker 2: he was upholding the principles by which his father had lived.
29:48
Speaker 2: There is something impossibly beautiful about that act. In my grief,
29:55
Speaker 2: it has given me solace. Revision's History is produced by
30:25
Speaker 2: Mei LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,
30:30
Speaker 2: and Ciomara Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Lawn
30:34
Speaker 2: Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Sciera. Special
30:39
Speaker 2: thanks to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberger Panople. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.