It's Time to Make Friends With Fat

We’ve spent decades believing that dietary fat is the enemy.  

The message that fat is bad has been ingrained into our psyches through marketing and advertising. We embraced it only when it showed up as body fat on our mortal frenemies further deepening our hatred/fear of it ourselves.

And still, despite all the fat lowering and obsessing we’ve put ourselves through, we’re still sick with the same diseases that staying away from fat was supposed to prevent in the first place.  Societally, we’re carrying more body fat than ever before. 

Obesity in adults more than doubled between 1980 and 2008 and extreme obesity more than quadrupled.  In fact, obesity related disease has replaced starvation as the world’s greatest risk to health!

Unfortunately, everything we’ve been told about the dangers of fat (and cholesterol) is wrong.

Fat doesn’t make you fat. Our bodies need fat for healthy brain and body function.  We need it to utilize fat-soluble vitamins, and to stabilize our appetites to create satiety.  Fat provides long-burning consistent energy unmatched by carbs and doesn’t trigger insulin release like sugar does. 

So, how did we get into this fight with fat?

During the first half of the 20th century, the number of deaths from heart attacks steadily increased until there was a record 500,000 deaths by 1960. People were terrified. They needed an explanation and they needed something to blame.

One theory contended that high cholesterol in the blood guarantees heart disease.  It became the foundation of the pharmaceutical industry’s most profitable drug, statins, too big a money making enterprise to be questioned.  

Another theory contended that the saturated fat and cholesterol in our food was to blame.  The issue with this theory was that it was supported only by observational data conducted by a member of the board of the American Heart Association, Ancel Keys. 

Keys wrote up his personal observations as scientific data deducing that populations with more access to dietary fat had more deaths from heart disease.  What he failed to report was that those populations also had wealth that allowed them access to other excesses like highly refined, nutrient poor foods and foods high in sugar.

And so began the demonization of foods filled with natural fats.

Around the same time, the crop oil industry started to gain steam promoting a “prudent diet” low in cholesterol and high in polyunsaturated fats from manufactured oils.  But it wasn’t until 1984 when Time magazine published a cover showing bacon and eggs shaped into a frowny face denouncing cholesterol and fat in food as “deadly” that our fat-phobia truly took off.

Fat has more calories per gram than protein and carbs (9g compared to 4g) and we became obsessed with calorie counting. What we failed to recognize was the fact that what comes with those calories is nutrients.

Answering the demands of the consumer population, food companies began manufacturing products that met the criteria of lower calorie, lower fat. Along came the introduction of 100 calorie snacks, and low-fat, diet, highly processed “light” foods that we began to consume by the bucketful (they’re only 100 calories so I can eat 5!). They were precisely the chemical laden, sugar filled, nutrient deficient, rancid from processed oils, inflammation producing “foods” that resulted in us becoming fatter, sicker and unhealthier than ever before.

These types of foods are very counterintuitive to our evolutionary programming. As humans, we ate fat in its least processed forms (think animal fat, whole seafood, egg yolks, avocados, coconuts, nuts and olives) for thousands of years. The most valuable nutrients our bodies can get are from fat-soluble vitamins that need fat for our bodies to actually absorb them. The perfection of Mother Nature!

Fat-soluble vitamins play a key role in eye health, bone health, heart health, skin health, reproductive health, immune system health, lung health and emotional health - to name a few.

Over time, our bodies become poorly nourished and inflamed from consuming these damaged oils, low-fat diets, and diets high in processed foods.  All of this can lead to unhealthy cravings and emotional eating.  Diets often fail, especially low-fat diets, because we’re driven to eat more seeking nutrients from anything we can, at any cost.

When we nourish our bodies with good whole foods and healthy fats, we nourish our cells and keep hormonal signalling regulated.  Our bodies then automatically know to tell us we’ve had enough to eat.

It’s time to look at fat in a new way.