Ghee vs Seed Oils: A 1967 Study That Blew Up the Diet-Heart Hypothesis

[TLDR: A little-known study from 1967 found a 7x higher rate of heart disease in South India vs. North India — despite the Northerners eating way more saturated fat. No one talks about it because it doesn’t fit the narrative. Subscribe to the newsletter for more unpopular truths.]

Let’s say you’re a public health official in 1960s India.

Someone tells you they’ve found a population where people eat loads of animal fat — ghee, butter, milk, the works — and they almost never die of heart disease.

And then they found another population, same country, same employer, similar income, same healthcare system — but this second group eats less fat, less sugar, and "healthy" high-carb foods cooked in "heart-healthy" seed oils. And heart disease is 7 times more common there.

What do you do?

If you’re Dr. S.L. Malhotra, you publish the data. If you’re everyone else in public health, you pretend the study never happened.

The Setup

The study looked at 1.15 million Indian railway employees between the ages of 18 and 55. And unlike most epidemiological studies — which rely on Food Frequency Questionnaires to posit causation from weak correlations  — this one had a lot going for it:

• All the participants had the same employer (Indian Railways).

• They had access to the same healthcare system.

• Their jobs and income brackets were comparable.

• They were housed in similar environments.

• The only thing that differed was geography.

And by geography, I mean: North India vs. South India.

The result?

Heart disease mortality was 7 times higher in the South than the North.

Wait, What?

The Southern zone had 135 deaths per 100,000, while the Northern zone had just 20.

And here’s the kicker: people in the North were consuming way more fat — up to 19 times more, by Malhotra’s estimates. And not just any fat. Saturated fat. The kind we’re still told clogs arteries and kills you.

In the South? They were cooking everything in seed oils — sesame oil, groundnut oil, probably some rice bran oil depending on the state. But they were eating less fat overall, so if your hypothesis is simply that fat causes heart disease, you'd expect them to do better. 

So just to repeat for those who might still be in disbelief:
The people eating more saturated fat and more fat overall had less heart disease.
The people eating seed oils and less fat overall had more.

And it wasn’t a small difference. It was a sevenfold increase.

Cue the Confounder Brigade

“But wait!” you say. “There must have been other differences.”

Sure. And Malhotra looked into them.

• Smoking? Northerners smoked more.

• Activity levels? Mixed results. Clerks (sedentary) had lower mortality than sweepers (very active).

• Socioeconomic status? Executives died more often — but this didn’t vary by region.

• Stress? Measured via disciplinary actions (a creative touch) — again, no correlation.

• Water quality? Maybe. But not enough to explain a 7x difference.

In short, none of the standard risk factors explained the North-South divide.

The only thing that did?

Diet. Specifically, the type of fat in the diet.

Malhotra’s Hypothesis

Here’s what he argued — and honestly, it’s way ahead of its time:

• Northerners eat a lot of ghee and dairy fat (short-chain saturated fats).

• Southerners eat more seed oils (long-chain unsaturated fats).

• Southerners also eat softer foods — think rice and sambar — which require less chewing and digest faster.

• Faster digestion = more bile dumped into the gut = different fat absorption profiles.

• Long-chain fats + rapid digestion = potentially more clotting and inflammation.

• Short-chain fats = maybe less so.

Does this prove anything? No. It’s an observational study. It can only indicate a hypothesis for further testing. But such a huge difference between the two groups is interesting. In most nutritional epidemiology, even a difference of 15% is often reported as a statistically significant result (see every Harvard epidemiological paper demonising meat or eggs ever written). This is a difference of 700%.

That's orders of magnitude greater than any study demonising bacon that's ever been hyped up in the New York Times. 

So Why Haven’t You Heard of This?

Because it doesn’t support the diet-heart hypothesis.

That hypothesis postulates that it's dietary fat, specifically saturated fat which leads to high ApoB containing lipoproteins (like LDL) and therefore causes heart attacks.

Malhotra’s data takes a sledgehammer to that idea. In this population, those who ate more fat and more saturated fat had less heart disease, despite eating more sugar and smoking more. 

What Should We Take Away?

Because of the methodological limitations of this study, we cannot rule out unknown confounders. For example it could be the case that the South Indians studied were all working in an office downwind from a coal-fired power plant. That's unlikely, but not impossible.

Here's what we can take away from this study:

• A large-scale, well-structured, natural experiment found a 7x higher rate of heart disease in people eating seed oils instead of ghee.

• This was back in 1967.

• We’ve had almost six decades to explore this finding.

• Instead, we buried it — because it challenges the status quo.

So the next time someone tells you that ghee is dangerous and that you should cook with sunflower oil instead, show them this study. And ask them why no one followed up on it.

If they can’t answer, they might just be another casualty of the religion of nutrition science.

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