Low-fat diets are unhealthy

Homemade pizza and salad.

Experts at last month's American Dietetic Association Food and Nutrition Conference warned that the conventional dietary wisdom of healthy=low fat is an inaccurate and unfortunate simplification of a truly healthy diet. In fact, this widely practiced - if not almost inescapable - notion of low fat as best for you, is in fact dangerously unhealthy. It turns out that replacing dietary saturated fat with carbohydrates can actually increase your risk of heart disease. 

"The emphasis should be on displacing saturated fat and trans fat with unsaturated fat because that is where the data is," Alice H. Lichtenstein, director of the HNRCA Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory, said at the conference. "Displace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat has been simplified to 'low fat.' That oversimplified ... message remains pervasive." 

Other experts called for eliminating "total fat" numbers from Nutrition Facts panels. They also reported that slightly higher-unsaturated-fat diets are actually healthier, especially when compared to diets high in refined carbohydrates. For longtime purveyors of slow/real food diets, or anyone that's ever bothered to read a few books or articles on nutrition, this come not exactly as "news". In my personal opinion, most food that have had the fat drained out of them taste terrible, and are markedly less filling. This recent "mainstream" reporting of the fact that fats are a necessary part of a healthy diet, is really an awesome confirmation that we should in fact be eating foods that taste good. By eating real food I think you not only consume fewer calories, but you actually enjoy it more.