Did you hear that sound? It's the diet pendulum, swinging back.

For 20 years, it's been hovering over the low-fat end of the spectrum, where the rules are simple: Fat makes you fat. Fat gives you heart attacks. Eat it at your peril. To reinforce the message, supermarkets have been packed with low-fat this and fat-free that.

Yet, you need only look in the mirror (or people-watch at the mall) to face the unhappy truth: Our derrieres are bigger than ever. Sixty percent of American adults are overweight or obese, increasing their risk for health problems, from diabetes to some types of cancer.

Even more alarming, the number of overweight children has doubled since 1980, while the proportion of overweight adolescents has tripled. Type 2 diabetes, which used to occur only in adults and is linked to obesity, has skyrocketed among heavy teens.

So, as we vow again to lose those 20 or 30 or 50 pounds, we can only wonder: Is there a better way to diet?

Yes, say a growing number of scientists and nutrition experts. The old advice obviously isn't working. Fat isn't the only culprit. Filling up on pasta and bread isn't a solution. Giving everyone the same diet isn't the answer.

They argue that, among other things,:

Sugar and white food, such as bread, pasta and potatoes, are diet derailers. A high-protein diet that stresses meat and eggs but cuts out sugar and simple carbohydrates (as preached in Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, for example) is more successful at helping people lose weight because they feel satisfied longer and aren't tempted to fill up on high-calorie snack foods.

Fat isn't all bad. The simplistic message to lower dietary fat ignores an important fact: Fat is essential for the body to function correctly.

There are good fats and bad fats, and we've mistakenly jettisoned some of the good ones and replaced them with bad ones.

If not eaten to excess, fat can actually help you diet because it makes food taste better and helps you feel full longer.

"It's the calories, stupid," as Alice Lichtenstein, professor of nutrition at Tufts University, puts it. If you eat more calories than you work off in exercise and activity, you will get fat. Period.

The experts can argue about which diet to follow to limit those calories - high-protein, low-fat, low-carb, or a mixture - but the bottom line is still the same: Cut the calories or up the exercise. Preferably, both.

The simple solution to losing weight, most experts agree, is that there isn't a simple solution. "It's like treating depression," explains Madelyn Fernstrom, director of the University of Pittsburgh Health System's Weight Management Center. "There is no one answer. Different things work for different people."

Fran McCullough figures she's lost about 500 pounds. The New York cookbook editor says that's about how much she has lost and regained and lost again over the years. She's been on a liquid diet ("fine until my hair fell out"), low-fat diets, low-carb regimens, Dr. Atkins ("a big success for a while"), and most recently on the Protein Power diet, which allows her to eat more fruit than on Dr. Atkins.

Do the diets work? Yes and no. Part of her problem is her job: She has to test and taste about 700 recipes each year for her annual Best American Recipes cookbook. "I think I'll only take a bite, but if it's delicious, I eat more," she admits.

Her biggest diet success has come from cutting back on carbohydrates and not worrying excessively about fat. When cholesterol tests showed her blood fat levels to be better than they were when she was on a low-fat diet, she began to wonder why.

The result of her research is her newest book (written with Barry Sears), The Good Fat Cookbook (Scribner, $25). It contends that in our single-minded zeal to eat less fat, Americans have replaced perfectly good fats with highly processed, hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils that contain harmful transfatty acids and free radicals.

These increase cholesterol in the body's tissues even more than do the saturated fats in foods such as butter and bacon.

McCullough devotes half of the book to summarizing some of the most recent research on fat, including that of biochemist Mary Enig, formerly of the University of Maryland and now with her own research company, Enig Associates, in Silver Spring, Md.

Enig has argued for two decades that transfatty acids in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils - not saturated fat from food - have increased our risk of heart disease and certain cancers.

Enig and other researchers say Americans would be better off including pure, unprocessed fats such as olive oil, butter, even coconut oil and lard in their diet instead of the hydrogenated or polyunsaturated oils commonly used in processed or packaged foods, especially the ones labeled "low-fat," "lite" or "light."

The best way to avoid eating foods that contain these kinds of processed oils, as well as "lots of hidden sugar and corn sweeteners," McCullough says, is simple. "People are just going to have to cook." (Her book, not surprisingly, includes more than 100 recipes made with such "good" fats as olive oil and nuts.)

Cooking is fine, but Americans also just need to stop eating so much, says Greg Critser, author of Fat Land (Houghton Mifflin, $24). Critser calls us "the fattest people in the world," thanks to our consuming passion for consuming.

Super-size, high-calorie meals, lots of snack foods filled with cheap sweeteners, and a medical establishment obsessed with cholesterol instead of obesity are some of the reasons for our plus-size problems, he says.

Critser, who used to be 40 pounds overweight, had his own diet epiphany when a stranger called him "fatso." He started by taking the diet drug Meridia, changed his eating habits ("cut my portions by a third, stopped snacking"), and began taking a daily 45-minute walk.

The freelance journalist also began investigating the political and cultural reasons behind what he calls the epidemic of obesity in this country.

Critser's and McCullough's books couldn't have been better timed. In the last six months, fat has become the diet buzzword, thanks in large part to vocal researchers such as Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. Willett's long-running, comprehensive diet and health studies have challenged many of the low-fat-is-good-for-you assumptions.

Adding to the diet debate has been the publicity over a Duke University Medical School study in which 120 overweight volunteers followed either the Atkins diet or an American Heart Association low-fat plan for six months.

Not only did the Atkins volunteers lose more weight (31 pounds compared with the low-fat group's 20), but their "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased and their blood fat level, or triglycerides, dropped by more than twice as much as the low-fatters.

The accepted diet dogma also has been challenged in splashy stories critical of low-fat diets, first by Science journal correspondent Gary Taubes in the New York Times magazine last summer and then in a Time magazine cover story last fall.

The new research seems to reinforce what low-carb diet doctors including Robert Atkins and the Zone's Barry Sears have been saying: It's not the fat that has made Americans fat; it's the sugar and carbohydrates - bread, pasta, cereal and particularly the corn syrup and sweeteners hidden in most processed foods.

We're gorging ourselves with that stuff. Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup - the sweetener of choice in most processed foods - quadrupled from 1980 to 1999, according to data from the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of the carbohydrates that Americans consume, says the USDA, sugar and sweeteners make up a whopping 40 percent.

Since these kinds of carbohydrates can raise the level of fat in the blood, researchers are beginning to question whether it's really the fat we eat that's contributing to our heart disease. Overloading on carbohydrates may be just as dangerous, if not more so.

Indeed, observers such as Taubes recommend that Americans return to "old-fashioned" thinking - that fat and protein protect you against feeling hungry and that bread and pasta put on the pounds.

But blaming our obesity problem on the health experts for recommending low-fat diets or the food industry for selling low-fat food annoys Tufts' Lichtenstein. To put it bluntly, she thinks people just need to get up off their duffs and eat less.

"People are obese because they eat more calories than they expend," she says with exasperation. "No one forces us to eat that way. You can't bash the food industry - they'll give us anything we're willing to purchase."

Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has another theory about Americans and fat.

"The number one misconception is that this country's been on a low-fat diet. Look at serving sizes, for goodness sake. People are eating giant burgers [and] blowing 500 calories on a mocha Frappuccino at Starbucks," she says.

"You're telling me weight gain is due to low-fat cookies? Give me a break. It's not SnackWell's that has made this country fat."

The diet pendulum may have needed a push, but Lichtenstein fears we're just replacing the low-fat dogma with some other simplistic diet debate, such as good fat vs. bad fat.

"The argument shouldn't be reduced to stick margarine vs. butter," she says. "That's just trying to find another simple answer."

Her answer to losing weight: Restrict your calories in whatever way works for you. If it's by eating more protein to stay full, fine. If it's by cutting back on fat, that's fine, too. Better yet, take a walk every day.

Source: Philly.Com: Washington Post.

January 2003 News Article Index