The war against obesity often portrays fat as the cause of obesity and health problems such as heart disease. Yet science offers a more nuanced view — it’s the overall diet and avoiding certain kinds of fat.
“Fat is not the enemy,” dietician Russell de Souza told CBC.ca. “What’s more important than the amount of fat we consume is the type of fat we consume.”
The origin of that saturated fats were associated with high cholesterol and heart disease was sparked by the Seven Countries Study of middle-aged men in Greece, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Japan, Finland, U.S, and former Yugoslavia.
The study began in the 1950s and was the first prospective (forward-looking) cross-cultural study meant to compare nutrition and mortality across countries with different diet patterns.
Study head Ancel Keys, a physician at University of Minnesota, warned about the risks of fatty foods and that advice has largely stuck over the past decades. However, replacing fat with unhealthful food may be causing new problems.
“When the food industry got fat out of the food supply, often times what it was replaced with was refined carbohydrates like refined flours and sugars,” de Souza told CBC.ca. “We think that from a heart disease perspective, that’s really been shown to be a wash. If you take animal fats or total fats out, and you replace it with an ingredient that’s just as bad, it’s kind of like we went out of the frying pan but into the fire.”
A meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010 that included roughly 347,000 patients have not found a link between saturated fat and mortality from heart disease.
The research team headed by Ronald Krauss at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, Calif. said further study about the potential risks of foods used as substites for foods high in saturated food. In other words, saturated fats may equally bad as using substitutes.
What this means is that people should be mindful of keeping saturated and trans fats low while not replacing them with salt and sugar. A small portion of a fatty food is more satisfying and could be more healthful than eating too much of a fat-free substitute.
The American Heart Association recommends that healthy Americans over age two eat between 25 percent and 35 percent of fat calories from mono- or polyunsaturated fats from fish, nuts, and vegetable oils. Saturated fats should be limited under 7 percent of total daily calories (or 16 grams).
Trans fats should hardly be eaten at all. AHA says Americans should eat less than 20 trans fat calories (or 2 grams) each day. Trans fats are found in deep-fried foods, baked goods, snack foods, creamers, and margarine.
Some foods labelled has not having trans fats actually do, according to the Mayo Clinic. If a food has less that 0.5 grams of trans fat (or any other fat), then the labels is allowed to say 0.
Adding fresh vegetables, fruit, and whole grains into a daily diet can offer satisfying alternatives to low-fat, low nutritional value foods.