Hi folks,
There are certain groups of people that are still recommended to specifically reduce their consumption of fat as a macronutrient. From personal experience, I’m familiar with post-cholecystectomy patients (not all of them, but commonly). Also I believe people with pancreatic issues. And finally I’ve heard of many people with fatty liver who have been advised to cut down on fat.
What I find interesting is how much low fat eating has fallen out of favor among the general population. As somebody prescribed such a diet, it’s difficult to find recipes or information about it online without encountering a slew of articles talking about how science has reversed course and we now know that certain fats are considered healthy.
At 32, I’m not old enough to remember a time when low fat diets were in vogue. But I understand that it wasn’t all that long ago that they were considered the normative “healthy eating” advice irrespective of any specific health problems. Ie, they were what was recommended for more or less everybody.
My question is when, approximately, did that shift in thinking occur? Are there still any reputable bodies that advocate for this way of eating? Or has the tide truly shifted against low fat?
I’m old enough to remember when everyone was on a low fat fad diet, and the ‘low fat’ moniker just meant added loads of sugar. I think they probably went out of style when Atkins became the next big thing in the late 90s/early 00s. Low fat in itself is not bad, it’s the highly processed foods with a ton of added sugar & salt to watch out for.
Low fat diets were more 80’s but are still a thing; go to a shop and you’ll still see low-fat yoghurts and other things. The sugar industry in America paid a lot of money to make people believe fat was the problem. It’s only really now people are realising that it’s sugar that is the problem, with palm or is it corn sugar/syrup (the American additive of choice) being the worst.
Capitalism.
Industry realised the cheapest production methods and made the tastiest food from those methods. This did not include healthy fats. It was easier and cheaper to produce foods pumped full of wheat and sugar. In time the human brain became addicted to carbohydrates and thus people do not eat anywhere near as much healthy fats as they used to.
With the advent of the internet. Information is a powerful tool. Big sugar and other food industry companies demonized fat as a way to sell us on sugar and processed carbs starting in the 60s and 70s.
There is lots of fascinating research on this. You can directly correlate the rise in obesity and other metabolic diseases with the increase in sugar and processed carb consumption.
I think it started when it became public knowledge that the sugar industry basically paid for most of the studies that villainized fats while burying studies that showed excess sugar consumption caused obesity.
I think it was the sugar industry trying to play off all their faults on fat. So the foods were labeled low fat but, then loaded with sugars, processed carbohydrates, and preservatives. I think after years and years of this and the population getting fatter and fatter some people started to catch on. Also knowledge is more accessible now so it’s easier to know when you’re being lied to if you know how to DYOR. So, I think the only people following this are people that don’t do their own research and just believe whatever their told.
First, the low fat diet was a misinterpretation of the diet-heart hypothesis (saturated fat raises cholesterol which clogs arteries) which originally (per Ancel Keys and the various experimental results) recommended substituting polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat, not removing fat entirely. The diet-heart hypothesis has been construed over the years to imply:
It’s a little bit difficult to follow but the earlier guidelines (eg the 1980 USDA dietary guidelines) recommended substituting carbohydrate while modern guidelines admit that was actively harmful and recommend substituting oil (from the Harvard school of public health blog, the natural authority of science 😂).
As a result, the idea of a low fat diet was essentially what would happen if they said “saturated fat clogs arteries,” nobody knows what saturated means, and people just assume all fat is bad.
As to why this whole idea is a disaster, humans depend on fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K so when you pull all the fat out of milk those vitamins go along with it and end up in the butter. The response to this was to fortify low fat foods with vitamins that didn’t have their fat, so they were not absorbed well. At present I believe a majority of Vitamin A consumed by our population is the fortified variety, not naturally occurring in foods. Conflation of the two isn’t great.
In addition a lot of the oil “recommended” is highly processed solvent-extracted lye-washed garbage with no vitamin content. So the substitution on the basis of sketchy science results in a marked drop in nutritional quality. A big initiative in the early 80s was to forge industry partnerships to bring to market a large amount of packaged processed low fat foods, under the assumption that the diet heart hypothesis was such an overriding principle of nutrition that the benefit would outweigh the consumption of abject garbage food. Hence why we see the obesity epidemic kicking off in this era 😂
My guess is that for many years the popular thinking was whatever you ate directly translated into body composition.
If you ate fat, it became body fat. If you ate carbs, it turned into energy. If you drank fruit juice, it was healthy because of vitamin C.
If you eat a bowl of pasta and drink a gallon of apple juice before running 10k, there’s no issue. If you do the same and never leave the couch…
As far as I know, most reputable bodies still advocate a low-fat diet. The most important probably being USDA, ACC and AHA.
The media … Well, if it bleeds, it leads. It’s all about hype. And needless to say, in more than just nutrition, they haven’t served the public interest well at all.
There’s also a misunderstanding of the cause of overweight. If you look at traditional diets, they’ve probably been mostly circling about 70% of calories from carbs (outliers like the Inuit weren’t many), and it appears this even extends to the hunter-gatherers, not just agrarian modes of living.
If you look at the US over at least the past 5 decades (from 1970s), carb intake has only seen a mild increase to a bit less than 50% of calories. So in spite of the increased intake of refined carb/sugar, our overall carb intake is actually down significantly compared to traditional/ancient diets.
Riddle me this: if carb intake is down about 20 percentage points, how did carbs end up the villain? We are eating more fat (about double) and protein, and less carbs, but carbs did it. This has to be an incredible triumph of marketing (probably one of the greatest) because it baffles me.
So where did the explosion in overweight come from? There weren’t as many overweight people in the 70s even on an already crappy diet.
To piggyback on your question: remember when 2000 Cal was considered the daily average? That was about the 70s. It’s now closer to 2500 Cal. Quite simply, we are eating more.
It has not truly shifted. A large proportion of the population still uses low fat dieting. The reason it fell out of cosmo is because when you demonize a food group for no reason the tide has to swing in the opposite direction. Keto seemed exotic at the time after people were told to use margarine and that fat was going to kill them, when in reality it’s calories in calories out. The shift to a more scientific and balanced approach is becoming more popular, and with time word will spread that fat and carbs on their own don’t make you fat.
There was also a highly touted study many years ago by a guy named Ancel Keys from MN who made a big leap in assuming high-fat food caused heart disease. The leap was grabbed on to by the medical work and went through our whole society. It is now widely understood that he was wrong. The whole country went low-fat (and everything was advertised as such…but when you remove fat, it has no flavor so they filled it in with cheaper sugar).
Part of the issue with nutrition research in the US is it is very nonspecific. You can find studies in the US claiming soy is bad and causes cancer. Yet around the world you find numerous studies that that is not the case. The difference? In the rest of the world they were testing whole soy foods (legumes, etc) while in the US they were testing processed soy (soy sauce…not even kidding). Same with anything else. “If you eat a lot of deep fried foods it’s really bad for your body. Therefore, fat is bad.” Except healthy fats like in avocados, nuts, and olives and non-factory farmed dairy behaves very differently in the body than highly heated vegetable oils that cause a lot of damage in the body. Many of our studies (especially years ago) did not differentiate.
I’m not sure when exactly the shift occurred but the whole food plant based diet could be considered a low fat diet since you can’t have any type of oils since it’s considered process, even extra virgin olive oil. So the only fat you will obtain would come from natural sources such as avocados or nuts. Research indicates that it’s a very reputable diet/lifestyle that is proven to treat and prevent the progression of coronary artery disease.
Low fat is still quite popular in specific processed foods. Nearly all flavored individual yogurts are low fat. Most people drink milk that is 2% or less fat. Lots of individual desserts, cookies, and other snacks food either have a low fat option or there main option is low fat. Low fat is leaving popularity, but it’s still very common in certain food groups; sometimes even more common than low carb, keto, etc that are more popular.
Does it have something to do with the fact that when a low fat diet was recommended, people moved toward an unhealthy high refined carb diet? The industrial food producers added sugar to stuff to make up for the lack of fat fr’instance.
I think that Atkins was an initial blow to the low fat diet montra but it didn’t really die until YouTube and more importantly YouTube diet and exercise influencers began acknowledging the benefits of fat in a diet and exercise program. This was around 2015 to 2017. At around 2017 was when fat went big with the creation of “bullet proof coffee” and the idiotic notion of adding about 300 calories or more of fat to one’s coffee.
That shift had started in the 2000s. Before being a foodie was a thing and instagram was known for taking pics of your plate. More people went into other healthier lifestyle diets or became more aware of healthy fats vs bad fats. The Atkins diet being the most influencial of the them then the South Beach Diet. I feel like portion control and weight watchers shortly after became the next craze.. from what I recall..
I remember the shift gradually happening over the 2010s from low fat this and that to Mediterranean and eventually keto etc… The problem I have with the question, though, is why does it matter? Popular opinion will always sway in one direction or another, but what matters is what’s best for the individual. Learning this takes time and patience.
Generally speaking, though:I avoid high fructose corn syrup, PUFAs and processed food-like impersonators like the plague. Anything in a bag or box gets eaten less and less frequently as I gradually move toward my goal of majorally whole plant-based and lean meats. I am limiting saturated fats moreso as well while trying to take in more Omega-3 fat sources instead. I feel better now generally than I did 10 years ago and my body thanks me… But that’s me. Everyone’s different and we need to remember that.
I’m 32, and 100% remember the low-fat / fat free craze…probably because I’ve been on diets since I was 7.
However, when I was 12, I was put on my first low-carb “atkins” diet — I remember this also being the time where there was research coming out that showed a lot of “fat free” foods compensated flavor/etc by adding sugar.
So, you pair that with the whole “Sugar = bad” Atkins craze, it was a perfect storm.
I still believe in it. You need good fats in moderation but this current trend of gorging yourself with high fat food is a recipe for clogged arteries. I see people eating 6 eggs and bacon for breakfast and they actually believe that’s healthy. I’ve got news for you, your cardiovascular system is going to pay the price eventually.
All macronutrients are important for the body, a balaced diet contains the healthiest sources of them. Its generally agreed that saturated fat is a little bit worse for you than the others, like how simple carbs are worse than complex carbs.
Protein can be very bad in high amounts, its all relative. you cant just boycott a whole macro because you think its bad.
2003-2004 Atkins Diet. Since then the data kept showing the benefits of Low Carb High Good Fat diet. What’s good fat also changed. That evolved into present day Keto. In between there were South Beach & Mediterranean diets that advocated for healthy fats. 2 Cents