It’s always been public knowledge that fatty foods are bad for you. For most people it’s just a no brainer. But this belief is actually a result of an information cascade.  In the case of fatty foods and its effect on health, the information cascade began with Ancel Keys, a diet researcher during the 1950s. Keys believed Americans were suffering from heart disease because we were eating more fat than our ancestors.

The problem with Keys assertion was that is wasn’t necessarily true that our ancestors’ diets were lower fat. Our ancestors actually consumed higher ratios of meat in their diet than modern era diets. Secondly even though more cases of heart disease were being reported it didn’t necessarily mean people were in worse health. This was can be attributed to the fact that people were living longer and people were more likely to see a doctor who could diagnose the heart disease.

The main evidence Keys used was a comparison of diets and heart disease rates in the United States, Japan as well as four other countries. The results concluded that more fat correlated with more disease, with the U.S. at the top of the list.  But critics have concluded that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data was available he would not have found a significant correlation.

As doctors were unsure of whether fatty foods caused heart disease they just agreed with the only research that was available. As more and more people began to follow the herd it eventually became public knowledge and soon enough the American Heart Association and the Surgeon General confirmed that diets high in fat cause heart disease. But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence up negative.  Analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets in 2001 concluded that they had no significant effect on our health.

As we learned in class, information cascades is when one observes the actions of others and makes a decision based on what everyone else is doing regardless of what their own information suggest because one assumes there must be a reason why everyone else is choosing to do so. This case is an example of one huge cascade where everyone followed the herd as they didn’t have research of their own and understandably so.  It is important to understand that although it’s been proven that fatty foods don’t cause heart disease it doesn’t necessarily mean fatty foods are good for you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2