FDA Commissioner Reveals Key Study on Diet and Heart Health Was Buried

'We created a generation of children with low protein, high carbohydrates, sugar addiction, and burdened with ultra-processed foods.'

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary last week criticized the medical establishment for suppressing scientific data on nutrition that he said has harmed generations of Americans. His remarks came after the FDA released its new dietary guidelines.

Makary highlighted the Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE), a 1968 randomized controlled trial conducted across a nursing home and six state mental hospitals in Minnesota. Researchers wanted to test the widely held belief that reducing saturated fat and increasing polyunsaturated fats would lower cholesterol, heart disease, and death.

The MCE enrolled about 9,400 participants, ages 20 to 97. They were split into two groups. One ate a diet high in animal fats and margarine. The other replaced roughly half of those fats with vegetable oils and corn oil margarine.

The results were surprising. The low-fat, high-vegetable-oil diet did lower cholesterol by an average of 14 percent. But lower cholesterol did not help people live longer. In fact, for every 30-point drop in cholesterol, the risk of death rose by 22 percent. Participants on the vegetable-oil diet also did not experience fewer heart attacks or less atherosclerosis than those on the standard diet.

Despite being the largest randomized controlled trial on the subject, the MCE was buried.

“They suppressed the data for 16 years,” Makary said. “Two other large studies failed to show an association. Finally, the study trickled out in the medical literature. Nobody noticed it. Those in the low-fat group had higher rates of heart attacks.”

Makary noted that swapping fats for carbohydrates—often highly processed and stripped of fiber—made things worse.

“We created a generation of children with low protein, high carbohydrates, sugar addiction, and burdened with ultra-processed foods, and what did we do as a medical field? Drugged them at scale,” the commissioner said.

This is the most recent case showing how the suppression of key scientific data has shaped public health in the United States.

In September, attorney Aaron Siri testified about another unpublished study led by Dr. Marcus Zervos at Henry Ford Health. His team analyzed electronic medical records for 18,468 children over 10 years. By age 10, 57 percent of vaccinated children had at least one chronic disease, compared with 17 percent of unvaccinated children. Vaccinated children showed 329 percent more asthma, 203 percent more atopic disease, 496 percent more autoimmune disease, and 453 percent more neurodevelopmental disorders—including 228 percent more developmental delays and 347 percent more speech disorders. Among unvaccinated children, there were no cases of brain dysfunction, ADHD, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, or tics. The study was never published because Dr. Zervos and his team feared reprisal.

In August, a Senate subcommittee revealed that by February 2021, Biden officials—including White House Deputy Director for Strategic Communications Benjamin Wakana, Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, and CBER Director Peter Marks—knew Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were linked to myocarditis in young men but suppressed the data.

In June 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that a 1999 CDC study found a 1,135 percent higher risk of autism for children vaccinated against hepatitis B in the first 30 days of life compared with children vaccinated later or not at all. According to Kennedy, the CDC kept the study secret and altered the data in multiple iterations to obscure the link.