The article draws on internal documents to show that an industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation wanted to "refute" concerns about sugar's possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that. The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding.

Other important findings from Framingham have also been ignored, including—notably—those on dietary risk factors, which were examined in the part of the study that Mann conducted. Together with a dietician, Mann spent two years collecting food-consumption data from one thousand subjects, and when he calculated the results in 1960, it was very clear that saturated fat was not related to heart disease. Concerning the incidence of coronary heart disease and diet, the authors concluded, simply, “No relationship found.”

“That went over like a wet blanket with my superiors at NIH,” Mann told me, “because it was contrary to what they wanted us to find.” The NIH also generally favored the diet-heart hypothesis from the early 1960s on, and “they wouldn’t allow us to publish that data,” he says. Mann’s results lay in an NIH basement for nearly a decade. (To withhold scientific information “is a form of cheating,” Mann lamented.) And even when the findings eventually came out in 1968, they were so deeply buried that a researcher has to dig through twenty-eight volumes to find the news that variations in serum cholesterol levels could not be traced back to the amount or type of fat eaten.

Not until 1992, in fact, did a Framingham study leader publicly acknowledge the study’s findings on fat. “In Framingham, Mass, the more saturated fat one ate . . . the lower the person’s serum cholesterol . . . and [they] weighed the least,” wrote William P. Castelli, one of the Framingham directors, and he published this admission not as a formal study finding but instead as an editorial in a journal not normally read by most doctors.VII (Castelli clearly found it hard to believe that this finding could be true, and he insisted in an interview that the problem must have been one of imprecise collection of the dietary data, but the methodology Mann used was meticulous by the standards of the field, so Castelli’s explanation doesn’t seem likely.)

Despite his other successes, being on the unpopular side of the cholesterol debate made a bitter man of George Mann. As he approached retirement in the late 1970s, a tone of torment crept into his papers. An article he wrote in 1977 began: “A generation of research on the diet-heart question has ended in disarray,” and he called the diet-heart hypothesis a “misguided and fruitless preoccupation.”

I last spoke to Mann when he was ninety years old (he died in 2012). Although his memory was not perfect, he seemed to have total recall for the deprivations he perceives himself to have suffered for having opposed Keys. “It was pretty devastating to my career,” he said. Finding journals that would accept his scientific articles, for instance, grew increasingly difficult, and after he spoke out against the diet-heart hypothesis, he says he was virtually barred from prominent AHA publications such as Circulation. Mann also believes that Keys’s sizable influence at NIH led to the cancellation of Mann’s longtime research grant. “One day,” recalls Mann, “the woman who was the study section secretary asked me to step out in the hall. ‘Your opposition to Keys is going to cost you your grant,’ she said. And she was right.”