To me, the 1970s hearken back to bohemian hippies and Woodstock and maybe even Allie McGraw. Underneath this sweet layer of 1970s whimsical trends however, I also taste the bitter truth. This was the decade the vilification of fat went on steroids. This was the decade, as my mom always puts it, of low fat chocolate milk. This was decade my mother spread bright yellow margarine on dinner rolls, adored low-fat Snack Wells, and munched on butter-less popcorn. My mother, a typical child of the 70’s, was only doing what her mother had told her, and what the government had informed her mother before that (Brownell).

My generation has inherited this diet as well.  A walk down the grocery aisle will confirm my generation’s obsession with low-fat foods. We’re bombarded with supposedly guilt-free options: baked potato chips, fat-free ice cream, and low-fat candies. But while our low-fat options have exploded, so have obesity rates. A closer look will lead one to find that this menu of low-fat foods and diets has not delivered on its trim, healthy promises.

The Vilification of Fat Commences

The saying goes that superior research will always yield the right answer. But sometimes research is no match for a strong personality. The perfect embodiment of this statement is Dr. Ancel Keys, the imperious physiologist who laid the groundwork for the fight against fat.

Keys first made his name in World War II when he developed the United States Army K ration, the imperishable food supply carried by troops onto the field. In the post war years, due to his interest in nutrition, he combed through research on heart disease. His research was timely because by 1955, the issue of heart disease had burst out of its seams, with American worry driven home by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s heart attack. That year, nearly half the deaths in the U.S. were due to heart disease and many of the victims were seemingly healthy men struck down by abrupt heart attacks.

Keys had an explanation: he posited that high levels of cholesterol---a fatlike substance present in food as well as naturally occurring in the body---was clogging arteries, leading to heart disease. Keys also had a solution: since fat intake raised cholesterol, he reasoned that reducing fat in the diet could reduce the risk of a heart attack. Keys sought to beef up the hypothesis with evidence by traveling around the world to gather data about diet and cardiovascular disease. His landmark Seven Countries Study found that people who ate a diet high in saturated fat had higher levels of heart disease. Therefore, Keys postulated that the Western diet, heavy on meat and dairy, correlated with high rates of heart disease. That study helped Keys land the cover of Time in 1961, when he took the opportunity to instruct Americans to reduce the fat calories in their diet by a third if they wanted to avoid heart disease. Key’s strong urgings caused the American Heart Association (AHA) to advise Americans for the first time to cut down on saturated fats.

However, his research had several catches that were not caught at that time. Keys cherry-picked his data, leaving out countries like the Netherlands and Norway that had high fat diets but low rates of heart disease. He intentionally ignored Chile, which had a low fat diet, but high levels of cholesterol. As well, Keys highlighted the Greek island of Crete where almost no cheese or meat was eaten and people lived to a ripe old age with clear arteries. This information was digestible until reviewing the fact that Keys visited Crete in the years after WW2---when the island was still recovering from German occupation and the diet was artificially lean. Keys’ research also played into prevailing yet untrue narrative that Americans had once eaten a largely plant based diet before shifting to meals rich in meat in the 20th century---heart disease magically followed, as if we were being punished for a mortal sin.

“[Key’s research] was highly flawed,” says Dr. Peter Attia, the president and director of the Nutrition Science Initiative, an independent obesity research center. “It was not on the level of epidemiology work today.”

Partly due to Key’s admonishment, the government smashed down the guillotine on fat ("Ancel Keys Was Wrong about Heart Disease and Cholesterol”). In 1977, a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its landmark Dietary Goals for the United States, urging Americans to eat less high fat red meat, eggs, and dairy and replace them with more calories from fruits, vegetables, and especially carbohydrates. By 1980, this wisdom seemed to have been written in stone. The USDA issued its first dietary guidelines, and one of the primary directives was to avoid cholesterol and fat of all types. That same year, the government announced the results of a $150 million study: eat less fat and cholesterol to reduce your risk of heart attack (Gunnars).

Now, in the 21st century, the 2010 USDA dietary guidelines recommend that Americans get less than 10% of their daily calories from saturated fat---the equivalent of half a pan broiled hamburger minus the cheese, bacon, and mayo it is often dressed with (Brownell). The AHA is even stricter: Americans over the age of 2 should limit saturated fat intake to less than 7% of calories, and the 70 million Americans who would benefit from lowering cholesterol should keep it under 6% of calories, equal to about two slices of cheddar per day (Gunnars).

Unintended Consequences

The food industry---and American eating habits---jumped in step to government regulations and studies. Grocery shelves filled with light yogurts, low fat microwave dinners, and cheese-flavored crackers. This was also the age of Snack Wells, the brand of low fat cookies introduced by Nabisco that surpassed the venerable Ritz cracker to become the No. 1 snack in the nation in a mere two years (Nestle).

Equably of note, a family like my mother’s followed the federal advice: beef disappeared from the dinner plate, eggs were replaced at breakfast with cereal or yolk free beaters, and whole milk almost wholly vanished. From 1977 to 2012, per capita consumption of these foods dropped while calories from supposedly healthy carbs increased---no surprise, given that breads, cereals and pasta were now at the base of the USDA food pyramid. But with fat gone, something had to be added. Americans ended up making a much more dangerous trade (Brownell).

Experimental Failure 

Nearly four decades later, the results are in: the experiment was a failure. We cut the fat by almost every measure, yet Americans are sicker than ever. The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes increased 166% from 1980 to 2012. Nearly 1 in 10 American adults have the disease, costing the health care system $245 billion a year. Deaths from heart disease may have fallen, but many heart experts attribute this statistic to better emergency care, less smoking, and widespread use of cholesterol controlling drugs. However, cardiovascular disease still remains the country’s No. 1 killer. Even the increasing rates of exercise haven’t been able to keep us healthy. More than a third of the country is now obese, making the U.S. one of the fattest countries in the world (Brownell).

Professors, researchers and nutritionists are finally realizing fat is definitely not the single-handed accomplisher of spiked obesity rates. Historical records show Americans were always voracious omnivores of fatty meat, feasting on the wild game available throughout the country. In his book “Putting Meat on the American Table” the historian Roger Horowitz concludes that the average American in the 19th century ate 150 to 200 pounds of meat per year---in line with what we eat today (Fulton).

Americans actually end up eating more with a fat-free, yet unintended diet: they ate an average of 2, 586 calories day in 2010 while they ate 2,199 a day in 1970. In the same period, calories from flour and cereal went up 42% and obesity and Type 2 diabetes became veritable epidemics. From 1971 to 2000, the percentage of calories from carbs increased nearly 15% while the share of calories from fat fell---in line with expert recommendations.  These results are partly due to the USDA recommending up to 11 servings a day of grains in 1992, compared with just 2 or 3 servings of meat, eggs, nuts, beans and fish combined (Nestle).
 

The Problem with Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates---refined----are the problem. Refined carbohydrates’ link to obesity and diabetes is due to blood chemistry. Simple carbs like bread and corn may not look like sugar on your plate but in your body, that’s exactly what they are converted to when digested.

“A bagel is no different than a bag of skittles to your body,” says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, the incoming dean of nutrition science at Tufts University.

These carbohydrate-originating sugars stimulate the production of insulin, which causes fat cells to go into storage overdrive, leading to weight gain. Since fewer calories are left to fuel the body, we begin to feel hungry, and metabolism begins to slow in an effort to save energy. We eat more and gain more weight, feeling the pangs of hunger more often.

“We wouldn’t give lactose to people who are lactose intolerant, yet we give carbs to people who are carb intolerant” says Duke’s Mr. Westman, who found that replacing carbs with fat could help manage and even reverse diabetes.

As this insulin production process repeats, our cells become more resistant to insulin, which causes us to gain more weight, which only increases insulin resistance in a vicious cycle. Obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high triglycerides and low HDL can all follow (McLaughlin).

New Breakthrough: On the Scientific Level

I am pleased to declare that the conversation around fat has begun to change.

The idea that saturated is bad for us is an instinctive sense. Hello---this is the fat that both describes the greasy stuff that gives our steak flavor to the pounds we carry around our middles. However, research on the molecular level has proven that condemned saturated fat is not guilty for America’s lackluster health as many presume.

When scientists crunch numbers in a met analysis, the connection between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease becomes more tenuous. A team led by Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, a cardiovascular epidemiologist at Cambridge University, concludes that current evidence does not support low consumption of saturated fats or high consumption of the polyunsaturated fats that are often considered heart healthy. Ironically, the main message is that more research needs to be done (Mercola).

 It’s incontrovertibly true that saturated fat will raise LDL cholesterol levels, which are associated with higher rates of heart disease---but that’s the most damning biological evidence against saturated fat. Cholesterol is much more complicated than that. Saturated fat also raises levels of the so-called good HDL cholesterol, which removes the LDL cholesterol that can accumulate on artificial walls and increase cardiovascular risks. Who would have thought that cholesterol has a naughty and nice list?
     

Additionally, scientists know that there are two types of LDL levels: small, dense ones and large, fluffy ones. The large ones are mostly harmless---and it’s the levels of those large particles that fat intake raises. Carb intake meanwhile, seems to increase the small, sticky particles that now appear linked with heart disease (Fulton).

Bottom line, there is a risk that people have been steered in the wrong direction by using LDL cholesterol rather than LDL particles as a risk factor.

The Nuances

On an even more punctilious level, not all fats are created equal. While saturated fat increasingly seems to have at worst a neutral effect on obesity and heart disease, other forms of fat may be more beneficial. There is evidence that omega-3s, the kind of fat found in flaxseed and salmon, can protect against heart disease. As well, a diet rich in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats significantly reduces the risk of major cardiovascular disease.

“The main issue here is comparative,” says D. Frank Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health. “What are you comparing saturated fat to?”

Even within the category of saturated fat, there is variety because a 2012 study found that fats in dairy---now the source from which Americans get most of their saturated fat---seem to be more protective than the fats found in meat (Fulton).
     

Also, one must keep in mind that new science does not facilitate people doubling down on cheeseburgers or stirring large amounts of butter into their morning coffee, as do some adherents of ultra low carb diets. Even experts like Harvard’s Hu say people shouldn’t be concerned about total fat, drawing the line at fully exonerating saturated fat.

“I do worry that if people get the message that saturated fat is fine, they’ll adopt unhealthy habits,” he says. “We should be focusing on the quality of food, of real food.”

Speaking of quality of food, there is evidence that processing itself raises the danger posed by food. Studies suggest that processed meat may increase the risk of heart disease in way that unprocessed meat doesn’t. How we eat----whether we cook it ourselves or grab fast food takeout---matters as much as what we eat (Cohen).

My argument is not that we should end the war on all diabolical eats----definitely not. However, I think we would be a whole lot healthier if more of our diet was made up of real, whole food like fresh fruits, vegetables, good quality dairy and moderate levels of meat.

The cold, hard truth is that the only way to eat well is to eat well.

Works Cited

"Ancel Keys Was Wrong about Heart Disease and Cholesterol." Health Impact News. Health  Impact News, 18 Apr. 2011. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.  .

Brownell, Kelly D., and Katherine Battle Horgen. Food Fight : The Inside Story of the Food  Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It. McGraw-Hill,  2003.

Cohen, Yael. "Moderation Not Deprivation: Why You Should Eat That Cookie." Greatist.  Greatist, 10 Jan. 2013. Web. 13 Dec. 2015. .

Fulton, April, Rebecca Rupp, Mary Beth Albright, and Maryn McKenna. "Is Fat Our Friend."  National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 20 June 2014. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.
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Gunnars, Kris. "Modern Nutrition Policy Is Based on Lies and Bad Science." Authority  Nutrition. Authority Nutrition, Jan. 2013. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.  .

Mercola. "The Cholesterol Myths That May Be Harming Your Health." Mercola. Dr. Joseph  Mercola, 22 Oct. 2011. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.  .

McLaughlin, August. "Negative Effects of Processed Carbohydrates." Healthy Eating. Demand  Media, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2015. .

Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.  University of California Press, 2002.