Fat Is In. Sugar Is Out. But Is it Good Science?

What’s the Latest?

In March of this year, a comprehensive study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine cast serious doubt on the link between eating saturated fat and contracting heart disease. If one piece of health advice was considered rock-solid, it was the link between saturated fat and heart problems. But the prevalence of that advice may have caused us all to overcompensate in an equally unhealthy direction, writes the New Scientist:

“In our rush to cut down on saturated fat, we may have inadvertently upped our intake of other unhealthy nutrients, especially sugar. In fact, one of the interesting by-products of the saturated fat debate is that it is helping to reinforce the emerging idea that refined sugar is the real demon in our diets.”

What’s the Big Idea?

As the angst of healthy people everywhere has turned toward sugar, health experts say there is a larger take away than treating sweet foods as the new health culprit. The real problem is our tendency to locate the causes of health problems in one specific food group. Indeed it’s ironic that in our eagerness to be healthy, we fixate on simple and counterproductive solutions. When we do this, a cycle is created in which we move from one unbalanced diet to another. What is needed is a slower, less sensationalized approach to public health; one that concentrates on common sense solutions rather than fix-all approaches to healthy eating.