Back in the 1970s the scientific community did the American people a great disservice. They began promoting the idea that fatty foods were bad for you.
They had charts that “proved” that people who ate a lot of fat had a higher cancer rate. They could also “prove” that people who consumed fats had a much higher incidence of heart disease – stroke and suffered more heart attacks.
People believed it hook line and sinker because it seemed to make all the sense in the world. You eat more fat and you become fatter. Eat less fat and you’ll lose weight. What could be more obvious?
We were constantly urged by the media, the federal government, private health organizations and even our doctors to reduce our intake of fat and we believed the hype and brought our fat consumption down.
Problem is – low fat foods taste terrible. The food industry knew that in order to get consumers to buy low-fat foods they’d have to switch to some other ingredient that would make their products appealing. The food moguls simply increased the carbohydrate content of their foods.
Then the food industry quickly jumped on the low-fat bandwagon. Suddenly a raft of new low-fat, reduced-fat, no-fat and fat-free products appeared on our supermarket shelves.
The government cranked out a new food pyramid that advised people to eat five or six helpings a day of starchy high-carbohydrate foods like bread, bagels and other floury goodies.
People began to believe that they could eat all the sweet stuff they wanted without any concern that they might gain weight. This was great news! Imagine being able to eat sweet, guilt-free treats in unlimited quantities!
For a while fat-free cookies were such a hot commodity supermarkets shelves ran dry. Low-fat, high carbohydrate Snackwell cookies became all the rage. Some supermarkets were forced into using waiting lists as each new shipment was grabbed up as soon as it arrived.
The food industry’s advertising machine went into overdrive burying the country with low-fat hype. And the cookies and all the other treats tasted so good! They were delicious and now you could munch away and consume whole packages of cookies without any worry that you were doing yourself any harm.
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It was a clear case of people wanting to believe something so badly, they ignored the scientific facts.
But the sad truth is, we were lead down the primrose path. The whole thing was just another scam to get us to buy more cookies and other foods. The food industry made billions.
How does this story end? Simple – we got fat. For over 30 years we’ve been fed this low-fat nonsense and the startling fact is that much of the healthcare industry has yet to abandon it!
The food industry knows that in order to make their foods tasty they have to either load them up with fat or sugar. Take a look at salad dressings. Next time you’re at your local supermarket, grab a bottle of low-fat, no-fat or fat-free salad dressing.
Look at the label. How many grams of fat does it contain? It probably has only 1 or 2 grams per serving. Now look at a bottle of the old-fashioned, high fat kind.
While it has much more fat, you’ll no doubt notice that the carbohydrate content is at or near zero. If the food industry made a low-carb, low-fat salad dressing, it would taste like water and no one would buy it. But if they load it up with either fat or sugar, it sells briskly.
So when the low-fat craze hit the food industry, they exchanged the fat in our foods for sugar. And since carbohydrate foods are the real culprit when it comes to rapid weight gain – we packed on the pounds.
Many medical researchers have written articles stating their belief that the low-fat craze is largely responsible for our current epidemics of obesity and diabetes. ■