Fat. For years — even decades — it’s been a focal point of healthy eating. Fat makes you fat, we were told, and many of us believed it. Bad for your cholesterol, hard on your heart, a risk factor for cancer and certainly something that makes us look unattractive, many of us were fixated on cutting fat from our diet as a means to get healthy.
Then came a gradual shift: We learned about omega-3 and monounsaturated fatty acids — the so-called "good fats" found in fish, nuts, avocadoes and olive oil that seem to do exactly the opposite of what fats were supposed to do. Suddenly eating fats — as long as they were the right kind — seemed at least sort of OK.
But the question about total dietary fat — in other words, fat from all sources — still lingers. Many of us still gravitate to fat on the food label, and naturally recoil if a food — even a so-called healthy food — has more than a couple of grams of total fat. Many medical and nutrition groups still stick to the adage that a low-fat diet is important for weight control and disease prevention.
But according to a new study, published in the December issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it might be time to finally put this increasingly outdated way of thinking to bed. In this particular study, a part of the EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) study, some 90,000 men and women have been monitored for dietary habits, lifestyle and health since the mid-1990s.
In this particular study, the average fat intake ranged from 31.5% to 36.5% of calories in the six groups that were studied, but — drum roll, please — there was no correlation between the fat intake and changes in body weight over the course of the study. In other words, eating more fat didn’t make people more fat (ta-da!). (As a point of reference, the percentage fat intakes were at the upper end of the dietary guidelines established by Health Canada. They recommend dietary fat should be between 20% and 35% of calories.)
While the results from the EPIC study throw more water on the old fat-makes-you-fat fire, it is not the first time we have seen results like this. For example, the same EPIC study has also found that dietary fat was not linked to prostate cancer risk or breast cancer risk (only saturated fat was weakly related to breast cancer risk), and earlier studies as part of the large-scale Women’s Health Initiative produced similar results.
So what do we do with this information? The easy choice might be any of the following:
- Throw your hands in the air, yelling, "I give up! Forget it! These idiots tell us one thing one week, and something different the next! I’m not buying any of it any more! Now pass me that Twinkie!"
- Jump up and down in excitement, run to your nearest McDonalds, order the biggest Big Mac on the menu and repeat until satisfied (or until gastrointestinal distress develops, whichever comes first).
- Continue to do exactly what you’re doing, and just regard this as more useless data an era of information overload.
On the other hand, the more evolved response worthy of as sophisticated an individual as yourself might look more like this:
While dietary fat didn’t correlate with body weight in the EPIC study, the subjects were still eating a fat intake within the recommendations established by most health agencies. In other words, these results shouldn’t be taken as an opportunity to start living off a diet of ice cream and Porterhouse steaks.
While fat intake as a percentage has levelled off or gone down in many countries since the advent of the "low fat" craze, the total fat intake has gone up. The difference is that we are collectively eating more total calories (from fat, protein and carbohydrates), which in turn, drives up weight. In other words, overeating, period, coupled with inactivity, is likely the bigger culprit in weight gain than fat grams.
The type of fat you eat still matters. While some types of fats — definitely trans fats, and probably many types of saturated fat — can increase your risk of disease, and possibly influence the way your body stores fat, other types of fats (like the ones found in fish, nuts, seeds, olive oil and so on) may protect you from disease, and — gasp! — might even help you to control your weight.
While the mechanisms aren’t entirely clear yet, it seems that the fats in these foods make us feel more full, and result in a natural instinct to eat less. On top of that, the other nutrients — be it the protein, fibre, vitamin E, magnesium or other compounds as yet unidentified — have an important role to play in health and disease, and aren’t found in more heavily processed foods.
The bottom line? Fat can be your friend, and if used wisely in your diet (no one’s recommending you drink a bottle of olive oil, even if it is good for you), you can reap the benefits that it has to offer, without having to worry about the scale.
- Jennifer Sygo is a dietitian in private practice at Cleveland Clinic Canada (clevelandcliniccanada.com), which offers executive physicals, prevention and wellness counselling and personal health care management in Toronto.