When I was stationed in Twentynine Palms, California, I took an afternoon to myself and decided to do my weekly grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s in Palm Springs. I was grabbing a few of their frozen dinners and a beautiful and painfully thin older woman asked me what I thought of the palak paneer that I was putting in my cart.
I gave it an enthusiastic thumbs up, so she picked one up and turned it over to look at the nutrition label. She turned to me with anger and distrust and said acrimoniously, “This has FOURTEEN GRAMS OF FAT!” – as if I had just recommended that she use cyanide as a sweetener for her tea.
I took a deep breath and calmly said, “We all need healthy fats. Our bodies run on fats. Our brains run on fats.”
This beautiful woman was doing what she had been taught was the healthiest way to nourish her body. But demonization of dietary fats has resulted in our society switching to highly processed foods and being one of the unhealthiest societies in the world.
The nutrition advice of the 1980s was a collision of scientific hubris, media influence, and externally motivated public policy that converged to create a powerful – and in hindsight, problematic – ideology: fat is bad, low fat is good.
The low-fat movement, institutionalized by government guidelines and championed by food industry marketing, not only demonized all dietary fats but also helped steer the American diet away from foods with genuine nutritional value. The enduring wisdom of “shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat real living foods” stands in stark contrast to the processed, fat-free conveniences that lined the aisles during this era.
Numerous studies and our annually declining lifespan have clearly demonstrated the harm of this approach to nutrition. Yet, we just can’t let go of it.
Heather Hinshelwood, MD, board-certified physician specializing in regenerative and restorative medicine at Fraum Health
The Birth of ‘Low Fat Is Good’ and the Demonization of Fats
The low-fat craze didn’t emerge by accident. In 1977, the U.S. Senate’s Dietary Goals report, followed by the 1980 USDA Dietary Guidelines, ushered in a new era of nutrition dogma: Americans were told to “avoid too much fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol” without meaningful nuance or clear evidence. The guidelines were shaped in part by early scientific studies linking saturated fat and cholesterol to heart disease. However, these studies provided, at best, indirect evidence, and their conclusions were often overreached in national recommendations.
This ideology was soon everywhere. Health media, government agencies, and food companies preached the virtues of avoiding fat at all costs – and the food industry responded gleefully by flooding grocery stores with low-fat or fat-free products: yogurts, cookies, snacks, and ready-to-eat meals with their fat content slashed and sugar or refined carbs ramped up.
Grocery shoppers, trusting the experts, filled their carts with products marketed as healthy because fat had been removed, regardless of what replaced it. Every time a whole food was publicly panned as unhealthy, there was a big food company pushing its own highly processed alternative.
Removing fat from food does not make it healthy. The deliciousness and satiety of fat were replaced by flavorless, sugary, and highly processed concoctions. The reduction of fat led directly to an increase in the consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates. As fat intake dropped from 40% to 34% of daily calories, carbohydrate intake rose to fill the gap, often in the form of highly processed foods laced with added sugar and little nutritional value.
Ironically, a meal of processed simple carbs is the best way to pack on fat stores. Simple carbs pass through the GI tract into the blood stream as a bomb of sugar. This sugar bomb in turn triggers insulin release, which then turns those simple sugars into fat stores. Low fat foods have created more obesity than eating a similar, natural food with naturally occurring fats.
In real life, children and adults scarfed down fat-free snacks – often in much greater quantities – under the illusion that “fat-free” meant “guilt-free.” Many believed that as long as a food was labeled low fat (or better yet, fat-free), there were no consequences to eating it. Ironically, all this occurred as national rates of obesity, diabetes, and related diseases began to climb.
One of the most astonishing absurdities of 1980s nutrition was how little scientific evidence actually supported these sweeping low-fat recommendations. Retrospective reviews have pointed out that there was not only a lack of solid randomized controlled trials proving low-fat diets prevented heart disease or aided weight loss, but the advice actively ignored dissenting scientific voices. Yet this questionable advice became dogma, repeated and reinforced for decades, while opposition was dismissed as heresy.
Perimeter Wisdom: Eat Real, Living Foods
If 1980s nutrition was about trusting the claims on processed food packaging, the real solution has always been much simpler: Eat real foods, stick to the outside aisles of the grocery store, and choose ingredients that were recently alive. The “perimeter” of a typical grocery store is home to produce, fresh meats, fish, dairy, and eggs – whole foods that would be familiar to our grandparents and that the body recognizes as food. These foods, unlike ultra-processed, fat-free snacks, nourish without stealthy sugar or chemical additives.
In recent years, science and common sense have begun to reclaim ground. We now know that not all fats are created equal, and some – such as those in fish, avocados, and nuts – are not only healthful but necessary. Moderation, quality, and a return to whole, minimally processed foods offer more evidence-based clarity than the simplistic “fat is bad” mantra of the 1980s.
In retrospect, the 1980s fixation on low-fat living – a movement fueled more by government edict and food industry interests than true science – stands as a cautionary tale. The journey away from the grocery store perimeter led Americans into the heart of the processed food jungle, with consequences still echoing today.
Let’s remember: The best nutrition advice is often the most timeless – eat real food, mostly plants and living things, and let common sense be your guide. Mother Nature does a better job nourishing us than food processed in a factory.
