Low-fat Diets are Making People Fat

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Low Fat Diets



Hold the pasta. Bring on the nuts, the scrambled eggs. Dr. Walter Willett, Chair of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard School of Public Health, says the much-touted, low fat, high carbohydrate diet is making you fat.

His controversial findings were presented to the 16th International Congress of Nutrition, which opened in Montreal drawing 3000 nutrition experts from around the world. They spent a week looking at everything from herbal medicine to genetically modified foods. Why is it, he asks, that North Americans are growing fatter at an alarming rate while food shelves are groaning with low-fat products and fat intake has been going down?

His research led to a nagging suspicion: Low-fat diets might be making people fat. People have been forsaking good fats in favour of rice & pasta in the mistaken belief that as long as they‘re eating carbo’s, they won’t add inches to their waistline, Willett said. While everyone worries about saturated fat, which is found in meat and dairy products, he said there is a much worse culprit lurking on supermarket shelves: transfatty acids. You won’t see those words on food labels as they are sugarcoated with names like hydrogenated oils and shortening.