Cutting Fat and Getting Fat

The trial lawyers are now suing fast food restaurants for selling us too much fat, and bringing on heart attacks. The lawyers hope to win billions of dollars worth of Big Fat jury awards, in a glorious replay of their victory over Big Tobacco. And they are publicly inviting all chubby Americans to join the cause.

But Americans have already reduced their fat consumption over the past 30 years—and suffered a huge increase in obesity! Maybe fat isn’t the villain we’ve been told it is.

Low-fat diets have certainly become a major industry. There are 15,000 low-fat foods in our supermarkets. Even the official U.S. Food Guide Pyramid tells us to eat fats and oils “sparingly.”

But the courtroom victories over Big Tobacco came because research had proved that smoking caused most of our lung cancers. That is why the tobacco juries were willing to pretend that they believed those lung cancer plaintiffs who claimed they’d never noticed the Surgeon General’s warning on their cigarette packs.

However, Science correspondent Gary Taubes just won his third Science-in-Society award for pointing out that we have no evidence that eating a high-fat diet causes life-threatening harm to otherwise healthy people. After decades of research, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on large-scale studies, we still don’t know whether or not eating more saturated fats than the officially recommended levels will harm someone who’s not already at high risk of heart disease.

In the early 1970s, 40 percent of our calories were fats. Now we’re down to 34 percent fats—a major reduction considering that all diets must have some fats. But a ten-year study of heart disease deaths published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998 found no reduction in the incidence of heart disease! The study found a reduction in heart disease deaths, largely because doctors are treating heart disease more effectively.

Worse, our reduced fat intake has been accompanied by a huge increase in American obesity. The proportion of obese Americans zoomed up more than 50 percent—from 14 percent 40 years ago to more than 22 percent today. William Harlan, associate director of the Office of Disease Prevention at the National Institutes of Health, said, “Most of us [medical professionals] would have predicted that if we can get the population to change its fat intake, with its dense calories, we would see a reduction in weight. Instead, we see the exact opposite.”

In 1988, the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General commissioned a major “anti-fat report.” Eleven years later, the Surgeon General canceled the project for lack of evidence.

Three major research groups have used computer models to project how much longer we’d live if we cut our saturated fat intake to 10 percent, and kept total fat intake to the recommended 30 percent of total calories.

The Harvard Medical School in 1987 concluded that average consumers would extend their lives by only three days to three months with the low-fat regime! A year later, the Surgeon General funded a “counter-study” at the University of California/San Francisco—but the second study corroborated Harvard’s. A 1992 study at Canada’s McGill University agreed with the first two.

How did the anti-fat craze get started? As is the case with so many bad ideas, it was born in Congress. Senator George McGovern’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs held a hearing in 1976 on “overnutrition.” Staffer Nick Mottern, a former labor reporter for the Providence Journal, was assigned to write the first “Dietary Goals for the U.S.,” though he had no nutrition training. Mottern got most of his material from a Harvard nutritionist named Mark Hegsted, an anti-fat crusader.

Mottern’s report suggested that all Americans should eat by the American Heart Association’s dietary recommendation for men at high risk of heart disease. Why? “Why not?” wrote Hegsted in the report’s introduction.

The anti-fat campaign stimulates our sense of guilt. Fat is bad and we are sinful for wanting it. Unfortunately, as we’ve cut our fat intake, we haven’t increased our consumption of fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Instead, we’ve consumed more carbohydrates: rice, potatoes, bread, and sugar. And our obesity has soared.

If Americans have cut their fat intake, and a surge in obesity followed, why are McDonald’s and Burger King the target of the trial lawyers? Why aren’t the lawyers collaborating with the Ad Council on a public service campaign to get us to eat fewer calories? Or turn off the TV, and get off the couch?

Well, there is the matter of those billion-dollar jury awards.

This article appeared in the Knight-Ridder Tribune on August 1, 2002, and is reprinted with permission.