If you ate a lobster shell would you grow claws? What if you exclusively ate fish, would you develop gills and a long tail? Silly questions? Well, it seems we’ve taken the “you are what you eat” adage a little too literally.
We’ve been told a billions times, fat is bad for you. We’ve been told it so many times most of started to think that the fat on our bodies is some how related to the fat we eat. Eating marshmallows and SnackWells is better than a big prime rib, right? Just look at all that fat, that will go right to your thighs or worse your arms! If you stick with the fat-free stuff you’ll be skinny because well they’re fat-free, right? Turns out that’s totally wrong.
Since US released the dietary guidelines aka the Food Pyramid, we’ve all cut back on fat and we’ve gotten fatter. A growing community of scientists are yelling fraud on the science behind the pyramid, the idea that fat is harmful and that the concept of counting calories is ludicrous. We know what we’ve been doing isn’t working. More and more Americans are obese and children are now developing livers so damaged they resemble those livers of serious alcoholics, because of all the sugar not the fat.
We have excerpts here from a New York Times OpEd by politely screaming for reform. Emily sat down with Bob Kaplan, an obesity expert and coach to talk about the issues. Bob offers helpful advice on what to eat and on how to read reports in news on nutrition. We hope you enjoy both!
The guidelines changed how Americans eat. By the mid-1990s, a flood of low-fat products entered the food supply: nonfat salad dressing, baked potato chips, low-fat sweetened milk and yogurt and low-fat processed turkey and bologna. Take fat-free SnackWell’s cookies. In 1994, only two years after being introduced, SnackWell’s skyrocketed to become America’s No. 1 cookie, displacing Oreos, a favorite for more than 80 years.
In place of fat, we were told to eat more carbohydrates. Indeed, carbohydrates were positioned as the foundation of a healthy diet: The 1992 edition of the food pyramid, assembled by the Department of Agriculture, recommended up to 11 daily servings of bread, cereal, rice and pasta. Americans, and food companies and restaurants, listened — our consumption of fat went down and carbs, way up.
But nutrition, like any scientific field, has advanced quickly, and by 2000, the benefits of very-low-fat diets had come into question. Increasingly, the 30 percent cap on dietary fat appeared arbitrary and possibly harmful. Following an Institute of Medicine report, the 2005 Dietary Guidelines quietly began to reverse the government’s campaign against dietary fat, increasing the upper limit to 35 percent — and also, for the first time, recommending a lower limit of 20 percent.
Yet, this major change went largely unnoticed by federal food policy makers. The Nutrition Facts panel on all packaged foods continued to use, and still uses today, the older 30 percent limit on total fat. And the Food and Drug Administration continues to regulate health claims based on total fat, regardless of the food source. In March, the F.D.A. formally warned the manufacturer of Kind snack bars to stop marketing their products as “healthy” when they exceeded decades-old limits on total and saturated fat — even though the fats in these products mainly come from nuts and healthy vegetable sources.
The “We Can!” program, run by the National Institutes of Health, recommends that kids “eat almost anytime” fat-free salad dressing, ketchup, diet soda and trimmed beef, but only “eat sometimes or less often” all vegetables with added fat, nuts, peanut butter, tuna canned in oil and olive oil. Astoundingly, the National School Lunch Program bans whole milk, but allows sugar-sweetened skim milk.
Consumers didn’t notice, either. Based on years of low-fat messaging, most Americans still actively avoid dietary fat, while eating far too much refined carbohydrates. This fear of fat also drives industry formulations, with heavy marketing of fat-reduced products of dubious health value.
Recent research has established the futility of focusing on low-fat foods. Confirming many other observations, large randomized trials in 2006 and 2013 showed that a low-fat diet had no significant benefits for heart disease, stroke, diabetes or cancer risks, while a high-fat, Mediterranean-style diet rich in nuts or extra-virgin olive oil — exceeding 40 percent of calories in total fat — significantly reduced cardiovascular disease, diabetes and long-term weight gain. Other studies have shown that high-fat diets are similar to, or better than, low-fat diets for short-term weight loss, and that types of foods, rather than fat content, relate to long-term weight gain.
