Week 1: The War Against Fat

February 3, 2020

Who isn’t confused by nutrition related advice these days? In spite of oodles of nutrition research, conflicting recommendations seem to abound. If anything is clear, it is that even medical professionals disagree.

Heart health recommendations are not exempt from this confusion. But before you throw your medical advisor overboard, bear in mind that we have had our medical worldview rocked in recent years by a real shift in thinking. We take our role in providing you with sound advice seriously, but at the risk of misleading you, we are slow to be confident of a new approach!

Let’s hit the ground running and take a look at several areas of controversy. The low-fat approach increasingly looks like the wrong one for several reasons.

Fat

For years we told you to eat a low-fat diet. You may have heard about a paper published in Journal of the American Medical Association in 2016 that shed light on what seemed to be a 1960’s cover-up by the sugar industry. The sugar industry hid sugar’s contribution to cardiovascular risk. As a result, the finger was pointed at fat. Our attention, research, and recommendations turned to how to eliminate dietary fat to promote heart health.

What were the outcomes of 30 years of low-fat recommendation? An epidemic of obesity, diabetes and related issues. What went wrong?

As a result of low fat recommendations, the food industry produced a boatload of low fat food alternatives. The problem? Fat tastes good, and taking it out of a food does not taste good. Improving the taste of the truncated low-fat food became necessary. Enter extra carbohydrate and salt as additives into the low-fat alternatives.

Soon the standard American low-fat diet became artificially high in carbohydrate, sugar, and salt, promoting the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.