Dietary fat is a type of nutrient that is essential to the body. It is also a type of body tissue. Sometimes it’s also an insulting word that people use to describe a body shape. Fat has been vilified in America for the past few decades. This is because studies post-World War II showed that there was an association between high-fat diets and high cholesterol levels. Cholesterol raises the risk of cardiovascular disease, so patients who were at risk for heart attacks and strokes were told to adopt low-fat diets. Sugar companies took advantage of this by paying Harvard researchers to say that fat was the cause of everything from diabetes to strokes. Despite low-fat diets being all the rage, people are now starting to realize that too much sugar is actually worse for you.
Key Takeaways:
- For a very long period of time, people didn’t look for specific nutrients in their food – it was more about just eating whatever they could find.
- In the early days, people ate mostly vegetables, but would hunt to give themselves an occasional addition of nutrients.
- Prior to the last hundred years, most people did not know how much they weighed.
“This maze of meaning distorts the scientific discussion of dietary fat — the nutrient we’re going to look at here. The history of nutritional science, including recently discovered frauds and cover-ups, has polarized the debate to the point where it becomes difficult to know the truth.”
Read more: https://foodrevolution.org/blog/good-fat-vs-bad-fat-types/