My wife reads More magazine. She was reading the October issue and just showed me an article titled (Almost) Everything You Know About Saturated Fat is Wrong. In the article, a professor from Harvard Medical School explains that the conventional wisdom on saturated fat is misleading -- and how eating it, in moderation, can sometimes be the healthiest move you could make. I particularly liked the following exchange:
Q: What about the epidemic of overweight and obesity? Are fatty foods more likely to make people fat?
A: That's what we once thought. We also thought that high-fat diets raised the risk of heart disease. But evidence has proved that the proportion of total fat in a person's diet has no effect on heart disease. Growing evidence indicates that this is also true for obesity. Dietary fat doesn't make people fat. When we studied how specific foods related to weigh gain over time, the main culprits were starches, such as potatoes, refined carbohydrates and sugars -- in other words, poor-quality carbohydrates.
Having just read FTS, and recently reading Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, it is clear that this information about carbs has been known for a long time. However, ignoring the science, the medical establishment has bought into the Low Fat idea hook, line and sinker. Perhaps the tide is changing. We can only hope.
