Economist: Why Everything You Heard About [Eating] Fat is Wrong

"The case against fat [in diets] would seem simple," writes the Economist, in a review of a new book entitled The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz.

Fat contains more calories, per gram, than do carbohydrates. Eating saturated fat raises cholesterol levels, which in turn is thought to bring on cardiovascular problems. Ms Teicholz dissects this argument slowly. ...

... the vilification of fat, argues Ms Teicholz, does not stand up to closer examination. She pokes holes in famous pieces of research—the Framingham heart study, the Seven Countries study, the Los Angeles Veterans Trial, to name a few—describing methodological problems or overlooked results, until the foundations of this nutritional advice look increasingly shaky.

The opinions of academics and governments, as presented, led to real change. Food companies were happy to replace animal fats with less expensive vegetable oils. They have now begun abolishing trans fats from their food products and replacing them with polyunsaturated vegetable oils that, when heated, may be as harmful. Advice for keeping to a low-fat diet also played directly into food companies’ sweet spot of biscuits, cereals and confectionery; when people eat less fat, they are hungry for something else. Indeed, as recently as 1995 the AHA itself recommended snacks of “low-fat cookies, low-fat crackers…hard candy, gum drops, sugar, syrup, honey” and other carbohydrate-laden foods. Americans consumed nearly 25% more carbohydrates in 2000 than they had in 1971.

In the past decade a growing number of studies have questioned the anti-fat orthodoxy. Ms Teicholz’s book follows the work of Gary Taubes, a science journalist who has cast doubts on the link between saturated fat and health for well over a decade—and been much disparaged for his pains. There is increasing evidence that a bigger culprit is most likely insulin, a hormone; insulin levels rise when one eats carbohydrates. Yet even now, with more attention devoted to the dangers posed by sugar, saturated fat remains maligned. “It seems now that what sustains it,” argues Ms Teicholz, “is not so much science as generations of bias and habit.”

Interestingly, government pushed the high-carb/low-fat food pyramid on an entire generation. Now we're told we have an obesity epidemic. Teicholz's book, which contains "well over 100 pages of notes and citations" and "covers decades of nutrition research," may explain why low-carb diets are increasingly successful and popular in reversing weight gain.