On Healthy Living

I was watching Good Morning America this morning, as I tend to do when I’m getting ready for work, and once again their slant on the health news of the day annoyed me. Robin Roberts says there’s a new study that shows low-fat diets don’t work for women and have no effect on cancer or heart disease. Then she asks some medical type what we’re supposed to do now.

The answer, of course, is eat a low-fat diet. The study they were talking about (which you can read more about in the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times) was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It looked at healthy women, some of whom were told to eat a “low-fat” diet while others were not instructed on what to eat.

I give you multiple links to stories because it is interesting to note how the different papers play it. The Post goes high with this quote: “Based on our findings, we cannot recommend that most women should follow a low-fat diet,” by Jacques Rossouw of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded this huge eight-year study.

In the LA Times, we hear: “Basically, the low-fat, high-starch diets completely struck out,” said Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, whose own smaller studies have shown similar results. “This is … the end of the low-fat era.”

Which seems a little premature to me. While it may be true that just reducing fat doesn’t have much impact on your likelihood of getting cancer or having heart disease or a stroke, that doesn’t mean it’s time to load up on lard and red meat.

In fact, the story is much more nuanced that a two-minute television segment could convey.

When this study started eight years ago, no one really distinguished between different kinds of fat. We now know that saturated fat and trans fat are particularly nasty, and that cutting them out does seem to reduce the risk of disease.

This study didn’t suggest that women cut any particular kinds of fats, so though the low-fat group was eating less fat, it’s not known if they ate less saturated and trans-fats (now known as “bad fats”) than their high-fat counterparts.

Even the high-fat/low-fat distinction is kind of fuzzy in this study. The high-fat participants, according to the Post, got about 35 percent of their calories from fat, while the low-fat group averaged between 24 and 29 percent, and the levels weren’t consistent through the group as individuals eat more or less fat over the years. That’s not a huge difference when you’re not also cutting calories, exercising, getting more fiber and choosing healthy fats like olive oil.

One doctor interviewed by the NY Times made a really great point that focusing on fat in the diet isn’t going to prevent disease any more than focusing on any other one thing would. You’ve got to look at the whole picture. Do you smoke? Are you getting enough exercise? Are you eating more calories than you need? How’s your fiber intake? All of these things in combination with lowering intake of bad fat certainly do have an impact on disease.

“People just think fat is the devil incarnate, and that’s an incorrect message,” said Abby Bloch, vice president for programs and research for the Dr. Robert C. Atkins Foundation in New York in the LA Times. We shouldn’t try to eliminate all fats, just the ones that tend to cause more artery blocking, such as those that come from animals.

Most of the low-fat women in this study ate fewer calories than the average American does and still didn’t lose much weight, which makes some scientists think something else was going on (lack of exercise, for instance) that played a part in not significantly reducing the risk of disease (though low-fat dieters had 9 percent fewer breast cancer cases than the higher-fat group).

What this seems to mean for the rest of us is what we’ve known for the past few years: diet is not enough, or at least focusing on one part of your diet alone is not enough. Healthy living means more than just cutting out the fat, which is hardly stunning news.

Sarah White wrote this on February 8th, 2006 and filed it under Healthy Living, Diet & Exercise, Healthy Cooking, Healthy Eating, Women's Health, Health Foods, Health & Aging |