Picked yourself off the floor yet? Still skeptical? Couldn’t blame you as the "fat is bad" message has been universal from all media and health professionals for 50 years. Turns out it was all based on bad original science, followed by a "cascade effect" where other public opinion makers were increasingly influenced by those before until it became conventional wisdom. Here’s a brief quote from the article in the NY Times, Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus:

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

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Read it all.

Shocking doesn’t begin to describe it. Over 50 years of being told to avoid fat at all costs on the basis of… no solid science. None. Zero.

Every study intended to prove the link between high fat diets and heart problems failing to find any link. What has 50 years of science and research shown? High fat has no relation to causing heart disease. Its not bad for you.

Even worse is that the whole drive to avoid fat may have lead to disastrous health problems like the modern plague of obesity with all its problems, diabetes for one. Apparently the science attempting to link the high carbohydrate diet (which most adopted on advice of the ‘health experts) with obesity is not yet clear. It also isn’t apparently clear that an Adkins type protein diet is good either. We should not leap to unfounded conclusions if we are to learn anything from this whole mess.

What now? Go ahead and eat the fatty foods in good conscience. Eat less pasta and carbs, but maybe not go overboard and eat ALL protein. In other words return to a more balanced and natural traditional diet which includes lots of high fat items, but eat it in moderation. Apparently lots of fat in your food won’t kill you but getting fat will.