When Mary Enig, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, read the McGovern committee report, she was puzzled. Enig was familiar with Kummerow’s research and she knew that the consumption of animal fats in America was not on the increase—quite the contrary, use of animal fats had been declining steadily since the turn of the century. A report in the Journal of American Oil Chemists—which the McGovern Committee did not use—showed that animal fat consumption had declined from 104 grams per person per day in 1909 to 97 grams per day in 1972, while vegetable fat intake had increased from a mere 21 grams to almost 60.14 Total per capita fat consumption had increased over the period, but this increase was mostly due to an increase in unsaturated fats from vegetable oils—with 50 percent of the increase coming from liquid vegetable oils and about 41 percent from margarines made from vegetable oils. She noted a number of studies that directly contradicted the McGovern Committee’s conclusions that "there is . . . a strong correlation between dietary fat intake and the incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer," two of the most common cancers in America. Greece, for example, had less than one-fourth the rate of breast cancer compared to Israel but the same dietary fat intake. Spain had only one-third the breast cancer mortality of France and Italy but the total dietary fat intake was slightly greater. Puerto Rico, with a high animal fat intake, had a very low rate of breast and colon cancer. The Netherlands and Finland both used approximately 100 grams of animal fat per capita per day but breast and colon cancer rates were almost twice in the Netherlands what they are in Finland. The Netherlands consumed 53 grams of vegetable fat per person compared to 13 in Finland. A study from Cali, Columbia found a fourfold excess risk for colon cancer in the higher economic classes, which used less animal fat than the lower economic classes. A study on Seventh-Day Adventist physicians, who avoid meat, especially red meat, found they had a significantly higher rate of colon cancer than non-Seventh Day Adventist physicians. Enig analyzed the USDA data that the McGovern Committee had used and concluded that it showed a strong positive correlation with total fat and vegetable fat and an essentially strong negative correlation or no correlation with animal fat to total cancer deaths, breast and colon cancer mortality and breast and colon cancer incidence—in other words, use of vegetable oils seemed to predispose to cancer and animal fats seemed to protect against cancer. She noted that the analysts for the committee had manipulated the data in inappropriate ways in order to obtain mendacious results.
Enig’s paper sent alarm bells through the industry. In early 1979, she received a visit from S. F. Reipma of the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers. Short, bald and pompous, Reipma was visibly annoyed. He explained that both his association and the Institute for Shortening and Edible Oils (ISEO) kept careful watch to prevent articles like Enig’s from appearing in the literature. Enig’s paper should never have been published, he said. He thought that ISEO was "watching out."
"We left the barn door open," he said, "and the horse got out."
Reipma also challenged Enig’s use of the USDA data, claiming that it was in error. He knew it was in error, he said, "because we give it to them."
A few weeks later, Reipma paid a second visit, this time in the company of Thomas Applewhite, an advisor to the ISEO and representative of Kraft Foods, Ronald Simpson with Central Soya and an unnamed representative from Lever Brothers. They carried with them—in fact, waved them in the air in indignation—a two-inch stack of newspaper articles, including one that appeared in the National Enquirer, reporting on Enig’s Federation Proceedings article. Applewhite’s face flushed red with anger when Enig repeated Reipma’s statement that "they had left the barn door open and a horse got out," and his admission that Department of Agriculture food data had been sabotaged by the margarine lobby.
The other thing Reipma told Enig during his unguarded visit was that he had called in on the FASEB offices in an attempt to coerce them into publishing letters to refute her paper, without allowing Enig to submit any counter refutation as was normally customary in scientific journals. He told Enig that he was "thrown out of the office"—an admission later confirmed by one of the FASEB editors. Nevertheless, a series of letters did follow the July 1978 article.16 On behalf of the ISEO, Applewhite and Walter Meyer of Procter and Gamble criticized Enig’s use of the data; Applewhite accused Enig of extrapolating from two data points, when in fact she had used seven. In the same issue, John Bailar, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, pointed out that the correlations between vegetable oil consumption and cancer were not the same as evidence of causation and warned against changing current dietary components in the hopes of preventing cancer in the future—which is of course exactly what the McGovern Committee did.
In reply, Enig and her colleagues noted that although the NCI had provided them with faulty cancer data, this had no bearing on the statistics relating to trans consumption, and did not affect the gist of their argument—that the correlation between vegetable fat consumption, especially trans fat consumption, was sufficient to warrant a more thorough investigation. The problem was that very little investigation was being done.
