The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [92]
Why would anybody in America want to humiliate, degrade, and befoul themselves by eating these dishes or any of the hundreds of fat-free packaged foods that Pam recommends to her million readers? Why did a million of us buy her book?
Because we have become mortally and irrationally afraid that eating fat will make us fat, bring on heart attacks, give us cancer. Fearful of both death and unsightly bulges, we are no longer able to distinguish right from wrong. In the ignorant grip of a national fat phobia, we recoil from the flesh of the velvet green avocado, the benign and perfumed olive, and the golden oil of the crunchy peanut as though these were the moral equivalent of the thick carpet of solid white fat surrounding a slab of beef. “A low-fat lifestyle is as important to you as stopping smoking,” Pam opines. This is dangerous nonsense.
What are the facts? The medical literature, available on Medline or in the Index Medicus to anybody with a modem or, for that matter, a library card, is quite at odds with the 1988 recommendations of the surgeon general, where most media nutritionists and writers of low-fat cookbooks begin—and then make more extreme. One good place to start is Dr. Walter Willett’s thorough review of the literature in the April 22, 1994, issue of the journal Science; then track down the research studies on both sides of each issue in his footnotes. But for now, here are a few specifics:
• Heart disease is not linked to the total amount of fat an individual eats. It is associated only with saturated fat, the kind derived from animals and perhaps from some tropical plants, like the coconut and the palm. This has been known for forty years.
• The heart disease rates of various countries are not linked to their total fat intake. In the famous Seven Countries study, the island of Crete showed the lowest rate of heart disease in the world, even though its diet was very high in fat, most of it olive oil. Today the countries with the lowest rates of heart disease are Japan and France. Japan has historically had a very low-fat diet, France a high-fat diet.
• National rates of heart disease are most closely linked to consumption of nonfermented dairy products and red meat. There is no link with cheese, regardless of its fat content.
• Though your blood cholesterol tends to increase as you eat more saturated fat, it actually tends to go down as you eat more unsaturated fat, the kind found in most vegetable oils.
• Not all fats classified as “saturated” will raise your cholesterol. Cocoa butter, the fat in chocolate, hardly increases your bad LDL cholesterol at all. God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.
• A low-fat diet can be dangerous for patients with adult-onset diabetes. A study published last May in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that, contrary to the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet then recommended by the American Diabetes Association, diabetics can better lower their level of blood sugar, triglycerides, insulin, and LDL cholesterol on a diet very high (45 percent of calories) in monounsaturated fats—olive oil, canola oil, and so on. Why anybody ever thought that non-insulin-dependent diabetics could get control of their blood sugar on a high-carbohydrate diet is a mystery to me.
• As much as 25 percent of the population is “insulin resistant,” which means that they may gain weight more readily from eating carbohydrates than from eating fats.
• Consuming lots of omega-3 fatty acids (the oil in marine fish and some plants, like purslane) has been shown in some (not all) studies to reduce your risk of coronary disease. But low-fat diets restrict you to lean fish that lack omega-3.
• Countries with a low fat intake do show lower cancer rates, but the link is with animal fat and meat consumption rather than with total fat or vegetable fat.
• National rates