The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [93]
• Colon cancer rates are associated in some studies with animal fat consumption, in other studies with red meat; there is no link with vegetable fat. Similar results have been found with prostate cancer. Alpha-linoleic acid—found in the fat surrounding red meat—appears to be a major culprit.
• Obesity does not seem to be related to fat intake. In a comparison of sixty-five counties in China, no link was found between the fat intake of each population and its tendency to become overweight—even though the people in some counties consumed less than 5 percent of their calories in fat. Southern European countries have a lower fat consumption than northern European countries but show higher rates of obesity.
• In a recent clinical trial at the University of Minnesota involving moderately obese women, a low-fat diet showed no significant advantage over a low-calorie diet. Though some studies claim an initial advantage to a low-fat diet, the difference typically disappears after a few weeks. Research at Rockefeller University has found no difference in the amount of weight experimental subjects gain or lose on liquid diets that are high or low in fat.
• To summarize: Saturated fat is bad for your health; the fat in red meat and unfermented dairy products is the worst. Unsaturated fats are perfectly OK. Olive oil is probably beneficial. Your body weight is unlikely to be affected by the percentage of total calories you consume in the form of fat.
If all this is true, then how did the mass frenzy of antifat paranoia begin? What keeps it going?
There is enough blame to go around. The National Research Council’s compendious and influential 1989 report, Diet and Health, correctly targeted saturated fat in some chapters but grossly misread the medical literature in others, warning, without foundation, against total fat consumption above 30 percent of calories. The FDA’s new food labels list total fat calories on line 1 and grams of fat on line 2; saturated fat and cholesterol come later. Nutritionists tell me that too much information confuses the public, and that if people lower their total fat consumption, they will automatically lower their saturated-fat intake. This may or may not be true. But asking people to restrict their diet more severely than they need to lowers the chances that they will heed your advice, reinforces the notion that deprivation and anhedonia are critical to the happy life, increases the ambient level of societal paranoia regarding both the natural and the man-made world, and propagates misinformation, which was once thought to be in itself a bad thing.
And then there are cult figures like Dr. Dean Ornish and Susan Powter. Dean Ornish made his mark in the late 1980s by demonstrating, over the skepticism of many in the medical profession, that a program of smoking cessation, moderate exercise, stress reduction (including meditation), social support, and a very low-fat diet could reverse the progress of atherosclerosis and lessen the risk of coronary heart disease—without surgery or drugs. His credentials as a diet doctor are much less impressive. Ornish’s very lucrative Eat More, Weigh Less (HarperCollins) is a low-fat, vegetarian cookbook preceded by eighty-one pages of half-truths. Since in his earlier research with heart patients he never bothered to isolate the relative benefits of diet, exercise, smoking cessation, and so forth, Ornish’s own work is irrelevant to the draconian diet (10 percent fat) he prescribes. His footnotes abound with references to newspaper accounts of other people’s research.
Ornish’s Life Choice program “takes a new approach, one scientifically based on the type of food rather than the amount of food.” This is, of course, the same “new” approach about