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If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of BlogHer Book Club pick Why Women Need Fat, here's an excerpt to get you started.
CHAPTER 1
Why Our Diet Changed
Like most American women, Susan is the one in her family who usually shops for food, plans the meals, and prepares them. Because she is largely responsible for deciding on the foods that she and her family will eat and she wants everyone to be healthy, she tries to choose foods that she believes will foster good health. To help her do this, she reads the nutrition information and ingredient lists on the labels of processed or packaged foods. She pays particular attention to the amount of total and saturated fat and the number of calories per serving. And she’s also familiar with the national Dietary Guidelines and its “food pyramid,” which proclaims that fat—especially saturated fat—is supposed to be bad for us, while polyunsaturated fat is thought to be better.
Since every processed or packaged food that we buy has a label detailing its fat content, you would think that there must be no doubt that these fats have a strong impact on our health. Surely there must be strong scientific evidence that following these dietary recommendations will improve our health. We know, for example, that if you have high blood pressure, taking medication to lower it can help you live longer. We know this because medical studies have shown it to be true. We also know that having mammograms can reduce deaths from breast cancer in women over fifty because studies have shown that they do. If women didn’t believe that there was good evidence that it was beneficial, they certainly wouldn’t do it. So surely there must be many medical studies showing that following recommendations to change the fats in your diet will make you healthier.
But surprisingly, astoundingly, there aren’t. There are no credible studies that show that following the recommendations to reduce total and saturated fat while increasing polyunsaturated fat will make you healthier. In 1993, physicians began enrolling more than forty-eight thousand middle-aged American women in the most recent of many studies investigating the health benefits of changing fat in the diet in accordance with the goals long enshrined in our Dietary Guidelines. Half of the women were given intensive training and assistance to help them to decrease the total fat and saturated fat in their diets to levels even lower than those in our national goals. The other half were left alone to eat whatever they wanted.
The women with the intensive diet advice did remarkably well in changing their diets. They decreased the total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol in their diets by a third while increasing the proportion of polyunsaturated fat. Their total fat and saturated fat intakes were well below the levels that the national goals and food labels aim for, just as the researchers had hoped they would be. They did even better than what the guidelines ask us to do. And the cholesterol in their blood did decrease by a small amount. Meanwhile, the women in the comparison group did not change their diets, and their cholesterol stayed the same.
After eight years had passed, the researchers looked at how many women in the two groups had suffered heart attacks or strokes or had died from either cause. They had expected that women who had changed their diets so dramatically would do much better than those who had not. But there was no difference in the number of heart attacks, strokes, or deaths between the women who had changed their diets and the women who had not changed. Changing dietary fat even more than our national goals call for made absolutely no difference to whether they had a heart attack or stroke or died from one.
But this is only one of many studies with the same negative results.
In the famous Framingham Heart Study, for example, which followed more than five thousand residents of a Massachusetts town for thirty years, there was no relationship between what people ate and whether they developed heart disease or died prematurely, and many other studies have also found no effect. One recent review analyzed twenty-one different studies and concluded that there was no evidence that saturated fat in the diet increases the risk of heart attacks or strokes. Another review found an astonishing lack of scientific evidence supporting any of the current recommendations in the Dietary
