A Big Fat Lie!

Which do you think is the healthier food choice, carbohydrates or fat? Up until recently, the average American would’ve instantly said carbohydrates are better because—well, because that’s what we’ve always been told.

Flip over any package of food and you won’t be surprised to see the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines and the Food Guide Pyramid. They are the icons of what it means to follow a healthy diet. What might surprise you, however, is how these guidelines came into being.

The USDA’s Dietary Guidelines were initially released in 1980 and were designed to help Americans make better food choices. It was believed that by improving our diet, Americans would become healthier and live longer. In 1992, the Food Guide Pyramid was released to provide a visual representation of these guidelines and to illustrate the ideal food types and portion sizes.

The Guidelines are based on a low-fat/high-carb diet. The premise behind this diet can be traced back to Ancel Keys, Ph.D., a physiologist from the University of Minnesota, who also worked as a nutrition consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense during World War II. As an influential government advisor, Keys convinced the principal medical agencies that consuming fat increased the risk of developing heart disease. He used the 1961 Framingham Heart Study—which showed a direct relationship between cholesterol levels and heart disease —to support his theory that saturated fat is what triggered elevated blood cholesterol levels. In turn, elevated cholesterol caused arteriosclerosis (heart disease), a condition associated with untimely death. Fingered as the death-causing culprit, fat took the wrap, and it was immediately decided that decreasing fat intake was the best way to reduce the risk of developing heart disease.

However, additional studies conducted to support this assumption never showed conclusive evidence as to its validity. Nonetheless, from that point on, agencies such as the USDA, the FDA, the American Heart Association, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute would forever connect fat with premature death.

To this day there is still no concrete data to suggest that a diet low in fat is better than a diet high in fat, or that replacing fats with carbohydrates is a healthier option. Yet the USDA’s campaign against fat has led Americans to believe that carbohydrates are— hands down—the healthier food choice.

Opponents of the early low-fat movement warned that replacing fats with carbohydrates might be just as bad, if not worse. Skeptics in the medical and research communities challenged low-fat advocates to perform studies on the effects of increasing dietary carbohydrates. Unfortunately, these tests were never completed due to a lack of time and money. It was decided the only real test would be the test of time.

The Results Are In
Over the past thirty years the average American’s fat intake has dropped from over 40% to 34% and serum cholesterol levels have declined. Heart disease death rates have dropped, yet the incidence of heart disease has remained the same. Public health officials insist low-fat/high-carb diets are partly responsible for the progress. Even so, we are now faced with a new epidemic—obesity.

Obesity in America has surged from 14% of the population to over 22%. According to the Centers for Disease Control, specifically:

More than a third of adults are slightly or moderately overfat

One out of every eight kids is overfat

Obesity cases have doubled over the past 20 years

This should immediately make one question: why has the nation’s body fat gone up, if fat intake has gone down?

Our battle against the bulge is being lost, miserably. Overfat/obesity has recently been declared a national epidemic now that more than 64% of Americans are overfat or obese. For years, this growing problem has been overlooked because it doesn’t result in immediate death. But when put into perspective, if obesity were a strain of deadly bacteria killing an equal number of people, the country would be in a state of panic. The number of deaths associated with obesity and overfat is expected to surpase the number of deaths from smoking. Approximately 300,000 people a year die from overfat and obesity, compared to 400,000 deaths from smoking.

Ironically, in a less-publicized press release, the USDA now acknowledges that carbohydrate consumption may cause overeating and obesity.

This article is a revised excerpt from the book
TrainChange: A Unique Step-by-Step Analytical Approach to Fat Loss
By Al Smith, Jr., The Fitness Specialist®