Thread by @puddleg

I can't find the tweet to H/T its sender, but yesterday someone pointed out that Mauritius is an a country-sized diet heart experiment, replacing palm oil with soy oil since 1987. 1/2
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/88985…

The results are not all that supportive of the diet-heart hypothesis, to put it mildly.

"Over 1981–2004 the proportion of circulatory disease mortality rose from 44% to 49% in males, and from 46% to 57% in females." 2/2

bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

That slide is a pretty good illustration of the hypothesis that diabetes and CVD are, most of the time, the same thing looked at in different ways.

Here's the best fit version of the Mauritius mortality graph adjusted for the coding change by eye.

Now these are percentage changes. Mortality has gone down a bit since 2004 but I can't find earlier data. But if the oil change reduced CVD mortality without increasing other mortality for net mortality drop, as per hypothesis the CVD % would not have increased.

Does anyone know how to access the complete mortality data, which is on the WHO website? I couldn't open the files.

Diabetes prevalence in Mauritius:
The age-standardized prevalence of diabetes in 2009 was 22.3% (95% CI 20.0–24.6) among men and 20.2% (18.3–22.3) among women, representing an increase since 1987 of 64 and 62% among men and women, respectively.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

We can see from the above that the rate of smoking has reduced from 30% to 20% since 1987. Usually this correlates with a drop in cardiovascular mortality.

Here's another paper on the cholesterol drop. There's also a letter from the palm oil industry expert debunking these findings in BMJ.
it says "we disagree on the kind of simplistic thinking and draconian measures advocated"
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

They did everything else right according to that paper, and the extra soybean oil let them down. The Finns from the 7 countries study seem to have advised the Mauritian government.