Sometimes a study gives you exactly the result you expected.
And then something else happens that makes you scratch your head.
That’s what happened in an old heart-disease study I’ve been reading about.
It began in Sydney, Australia, in the 1960s.
Researchers recruited 458 men between 30 and 59 who had recently experienced a heart attack or another coronary problem.
They divided them into two groups.
One group was instructed to reduce saturated fat and replace much of it with safflower oil and a safflower-oil margarine rich in omega-6 linoleic acid.
The other group wasn’t given those special dietary instructions or foods.
And something happened exactly as expected.
The cholesterol came down.
But then came the part that makes this study so interesting.
More Men in the Intervention Group Died
Years later, researchers recovered the original study data and reanalyzed it using modern statistical methods.
The group assigned to the safflower-oil intervention had lowered its total cholesterol significantl…
