A 2025 paper claiming that the keto diet does not promote the formation of arterial plaques was retracted following widespread criticism of the study’s methods and claims. According to the retraction notice, the magazine found that “the identified errors are too large to be corrected in an errata.”
In April 2025, JACC: Progress The study looked at plaque buildup in 100 otherwise healthy people who experienced elevated cholesterol levels while on a keto diet. In this study, Clerly claims that scans performed every other year showed that diet was not associated with the development of arterial plaque.
This finding is contrary to those found in previous studies, which resulted in the following. wired It has been called “the new war in nutrition.”
Critics began warning about the paper soon after publication, including a May 2025 letter to the journal that raised other concerns, including “selective reporting” of data, questionable statistical analysis, and too short a study period. Others pointed out that one of the paper’s authors, Dave Feldman, is “a software engineer and entrepreneur with no medical license or training who has focused his career on all things ketogenics and cholesterol.”
Three of the study’s authors, Nicholas Nowitz, Adrian Sotomota, and Feldman, told Retraction Watch that they did not have access to the data before the study was published and did not know that Cleary’s analysis was not double-blind. They said they reviewed the data for the first time after publication and alerted the journal “immediately.” They insisted on publishing a statement of concern, which was attached to the paper in January. They also said they did not know co-author James Earls was Cleary’s chief medical officer at the time the data was collected.
In a Substack post about the retraction, Norwitz wrote that the data was intentionally not accessible until after publication. “Everyone not involved in the statistical analysis leading to the original discovery is appropriately ‘blinded’ to the raw data to protect the integrity of the process,” he wrote. “However, after publication, the anonymized raw data was provided to the Citizen Science Foundation, which funded the research.” [to] Dave Feldman did a more detailed analysis and found a number of anomalies. ” Feldman is the foundation’s founder and chairman.
Norwitz said he wished he had reviewed the data before publishing. “The liability at the time seemed to be to be deprived of access until it was published, so no one could reasonably accuse me of putting my finger on the scale or influencing the analysis,” he said.
“My real hindsight correction is that CSF should have required explicit, documented quality control assurances from outside vendors providing analytical data for the study, including provisions for blinded reanalysis if significant concerns arose,” Feldman said. “We never expected to receive a dataset from a large commercial provider and then identify very anomalous patterns and still not be able to directly address those concerns with quality control. This is something I never want to assume again.”
Representative from JACC: Progress Earls told us that he disclosed his relationship with the company when the manuscript was submitted and, once the paper was accepted, told the Journal that he held shares in Creeley. The publication mentioned Mr. Earls’ partnership with Cleary, but did not disclose the amount of his stake.
In January, six members of the research team posted a preprint reporting a reanalysis of the data using an “independent, blinded, confirmatory analysis” by HeartFlow. They told us that the preprint was undergoing peer review in another journal and said they had addressed the critics’ concerns in a new manuscript.
Earls is no longer listed as a co-author of the group and as CMO on the Cleerly leadership webpage. Kristy Siebert, Cleary’s communications manager, declined to answer questions about Earls’ apparent change in position or why the company didn’t double-blind its data analysis.
Brad Stanfield, a New Zealand nutritionist and outspoken critic of the study, said the reanalysis “raises new concerns rather than resolving old ones”.
“Retractions are warranted, and reconstructing the same data to confirm the original story is, in my opinion, more advocacy than science,” he said.
Another critic of the now-retracted study, internist Michael Mindrum, said the new analysis showed improvements and acknowledged that the authors had responded to some of the criticisms in the original paper. But in his view, “this whole effort is at the intersection of social media fraud and medicine. It’s all unfortunate.” He said it was clear the authors were “trying to fit whatever data is out there into a ‘story.'”
Mindrum called two of the authors, Norwitz and Feldman, “social media influencers with huge media footprints.”
In a post on Substack, Norwitz said he was “very happy” to retract the original paper because the findings remain “incredibly robust” and should be published without the controversy that affected the original paper.
He also took aim at the “embarrassing” and “appearance of willful disregard” of those who detractor the medical and academic community.
But Stanfield disagreed that the central claim holds. “If the original methodology was sound enough to be touted as revolutionary, there should be no need to retract it. If retraction was necessary, the publicity campaign that accompanied its release was premature at best,” he said. At the time, the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where three of the authors worked and where the scans were performed, announced that the study heralded a paradigm shift.
“The public, including patients making clinical decisions about their LDL, should have been more humble from the beginning,” he said.
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