The Seven Countries Study

Reorienting to the primary sources serves to deconstruct longstanding myths surrounding the seminal Seven Countries Study Modern critics of the Seven Countries Study (SCS),1–3 routinely writers of books and blogs for the general public, and occasionally genuine content-experts citing these, question the conclusions, methodology, motives, and propriety of Ancel Keys and his fellow SCS researchers. Indeed, the word ‘conspiracy’ has been used in association with the study.4 These criticisms of Keys and the SCS are of outsized importance because they are routinely referenced in efforts to discredit not just the study itself, but prevailing views in the field of nutritional epidemiology, predicated both on research inspired by the SCS, as well as fully independent research that followed. The SCS was convened in the 1950s principally to explore a potential link between diet and lifestyle, and heart disease—which at the time was not yet known to be other than an inevitable consequence of aging.7 For the first time using standard criteria, the SCS documented approximately 10-fold differences in cardiovascular disease (CVD) incidence and mortality between the highest risk region (Finland), and Crete and rural Japanese populations. Using a small sample of participants in each of the 16 populations studied, the SCS revealed a correlation between population average saturated fat intake and the rate of CVD.