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During World War 2,, doctors in The Netherlands and Scandinavia noted a curious fact: despite the stresses of Nazi occupation, the death rate from coronary artery disease was slowly dropping.

Not until long after the war -- 1950, in fact -- did they get a hint of the reason.

That year, Sweden's Haqvin Malmros showed that the sinking death rate neatly coincided with increasingly severe restrictions on fatty foods.

That same year the University of California's Dr. Laurance Kinsell, timing oxidation rates of blood fats, stumbled onto the discovery that many vegetable fats cause blood cholesterol levels to drop radically, while animal fats cause them to rise.

Here Keys and others, such as Dr. A. E. Ahrens of the Rockefeller Institute, took over to demonstrate the chemical difference between vegetable and animal fats -- and even between different varieties of each.