bsheets
Sun, Oct-16-05, 01:41
With the rise of low-fat foods, an obesity epidemic has broken out in Australia. Is this mere coincidence?
http://melbourne.citysearch.com.au/profile?fid=22&id=24485&p=1
You'd be amazed if you stepped back in time and browsed the aisles of a 1970s supermarket. Absent from the shelves would be the glut of fat-free yoghurt, lite ice-cream and 98-per cent fat-free chocolate biscuits. Instead, you'd see rows of full-cream, full-fat produce. You might conclude that people were fatter then. But you'd be wrong. Since the early 1980s, low-fat has become big business and our shops are crammed with fat-reduced, fat-free and lite options. The Australian Dairy Corporation says that 40 per cent of all dairy products are now fat-modified, and the figure is rising. Despite being slaves to the fat-free dogma, we are anything but.
Our bodies are heavier than ever and obesity is now considered to be pandemic, according to the World Health Organisation. In 1980, the rate of obesity in Australia was 6 per cent. By 1990, it had risen to 10 per cent and by 1995, it had skyrocketed to 18 per cent, government health figures say. Kilo for kilo, the average Australian man was 3.6 kilograms weightier in 1995 than in 1985, and the average woman was 4.8 kilograms heavier. Considering there wasn't the range of muffins, milks, yoghurts, chocolates, cheeses and creams stripped of their fat content back in 1985, this seems incongruous.
Dietary focus shifted to fat consumption during World War II. When food was scarce, kilojoules were valuable, and main sources were saturated fats and lard. Post-war research into cholesterol found that eating fat raised your risk of heart disease, so the message went out: eat less fat. Later, nutritionists said that cutting fat from our diet would not only slash our heart problems, but make us skinnier as well, giving birth to the low-fat food industry.
Yet since the 1970s, a growing faction of health experts has been slowly contesting and rethinking the role of fat in our diet. Dr Robert Atkins was the first to say that carbohydrates, not fat, were the main concern, in his now-famous book The New Diet Revolution. This diet famously advised us not to worry about butter or cream, but about bread and pasta instead.
The same message - low carbohydrates, high fat, high protein - has been relayed over the decades. In the 1990s, US scientist Barry Sears echoed it in his book Enter The Zone, calling the low-fat diet an experiment gone wrong. More recently, British health journalist Leslie Kenton, in her book Age Power, agreed. "It is time to face facts: the high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet has proved itself a failure."
Gary Taubes, author and correspondent for Science Magazine, continued this attack on the low-fat diet in a recently published New York Times article, saying that fat is not our waistline's greatest enemy, but carbohydrates are - the very foundation of our food pyramid. His argument, supported in parts by other US experts, is that intake of carbohydrates (in the form of rice, pasta, bread and other dietary staples) raises insulin levels in the bloodstream and encourages the body to store weight. This has also been referred to as Syndrome X.
So, does this mean that after decades of low-fat dieting, we may have swallowed the wrong advice? "There is always the possibility that what we have been told is fallible," says Dr David Crawford, a health expert at Deakin University. "However, the truth is that [obesity] is a very complex picture, and it would be dangerous to look at only one piece of it.
Michelle Pink, a dietician at the Australian Dairy Corporation, agrees that other factors should be considered: "We need to look at the relationship between environment and genetics, examine reduced levels of physical activity and new eating patterns, such as reliance on pre-packaged foods." Importantly, say experts, just because something is labelled low-fat, it doesn't mean it's sugar-free.
The other problem with low-fat eating is its psychological effect. You might trade off kilojoules, thinking that because you've cut down on fat in that muffin, you can indulge in more pasta for lunch, which is not the case.
Despite this, many insist the fat-free advice is sound. "For weight loss, low-fat diets work but are more efficient if you can reduce kilojoules at the same time," says Professor Ian Caterson, of the human nutrition unit at Sydney University. "Australians are eating less fat [men went from 106 grams a day to 100 grams a day from 1985 to 1995], but we are also eating more in total, and this counterbalances the reduction in fat."
One thing experts agree on is that the formula to achieve weight loss is simple: the more energy you put in, the more you have to burn off. Says Dr Caryl Nowson, a nutrition lecturer at Deakin University, "Any diet that has a negative energy balance [you burn off more than you consume] will result in weight loss, wherever those kilojoules came from: protein, carbohydrate, fat or even alcohol. It is the law of physics. If we are taking in more energy than we are expending, we will gain weight."
Excerpt from a feature by Alix Johnson, Sunday Life, December 2002
http://melbourne.citysearch.com.au/profile?fid=22&id=24485&p=1
You'd be amazed if you stepped back in time and browsed the aisles of a 1970s supermarket. Absent from the shelves would be the glut of fat-free yoghurt, lite ice-cream and 98-per cent fat-free chocolate biscuits. Instead, you'd see rows of full-cream, full-fat produce. You might conclude that people were fatter then. But you'd be wrong. Since the early 1980s, low-fat has become big business and our shops are crammed with fat-reduced, fat-free and lite options. The Australian Dairy Corporation says that 40 per cent of all dairy products are now fat-modified, and the figure is rising. Despite being slaves to the fat-free dogma, we are anything but.
Our bodies are heavier than ever and obesity is now considered to be pandemic, according to the World Health Organisation. In 1980, the rate of obesity in Australia was 6 per cent. By 1990, it had risen to 10 per cent and by 1995, it had skyrocketed to 18 per cent, government health figures say. Kilo for kilo, the average Australian man was 3.6 kilograms weightier in 1995 than in 1985, and the average woman was 4.8 kilograms heavier. Considering there wasn't the range of muffins, milks, yoghurts, chocolates, cheeses and creams stripped of their fat content back in 1985, this seems incongruous.
Dietary focus shifted to fat consumption during World War II. When food was scarce, kilojoules were valuable, and main sources were saturated fats and lard. Post-war research into cholesterol found that eating fat raised your risk of heart disease, so the message went out: eat less fat. Later, nutritionists said that cutting fat from our diet would not only slash our heart problems, but make us skinnier as well, giving birth to the low-fat food industry.
Yet since the 1970s, a growing faction of health experts has been slowly contesting and rethinking the role of fat in our diet. Dr Robert Atkins was the first to say that carbohydrates, not fat, were the main concern, in his now-famous book The New Diet Revolution. This diet famously advised us not to worry about butter or cream, but about bread and pasta instead.
The same message - low carbohydrates, high fat, high protein - has been relayed over the decades. In the 1990s, US scientist Barry Sears echoed it in his book Enter The Zone, calling the low-fat diet an experiment gone wrong. More recently, British health journalist Leslie Kenton, in her book Age Power, agreed. "It is time to face facts: the high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet has proved itself a failure."
Gary Taubes, author and correspondent for Science Magazine, continued this attack on the low-fat diet in a recently published New York Times article, saying that fat is not our waistline's greatest enemy, but carbohydrates are - the very foundation of our food pyramid. His argument, supported in parts by other US experts, is that intake of carbohydrates (in the form of rice, pasta, bread and other dietary staples) raises insulin levels in the bloodstream and encourages the body to store weight. This has also been referred to as Syndrome X.
So, does this mean that after decades of low-fat dieting, we may have swallowed the wrong advice? "There is always the possibility that what we have been told is fallible," says Dr David Crawford, a health expert at Deakin University. "However, the truth is that [obesity] is a very complex picture, and it would be dangerous to look at only one piece of it.
Michelle Pink, a dietician at the Australian Dairy Corporation, agrees that other factors should be considered: "We need to look at the relationship between environment and genetics, examine reduced levels of physical activity and new eating patterns, such as reliance on pre-packaged foods." Importantly, say experts, just because something is labelled low-fat, it doesn't mean it's sugar-free.
The other problem with low-fat eating is its psychological effect. You might trade off kilojoules, thinking that because you've cut down on fat in that muffin, you can indulge in more pasta for lunch, which is not the case.
Despite this, many insist the fat-free advice is sound. "For weight loss, low-fat diets work but are more efficient if you can reduce kilojoules at the same time," says Professor Ian Caterson, of the human nutrition unit at Sydney University. "Australians are eating less fat [men went from 106 grams a day to 100 grams a day from 1985 to 1995], but we are also eating more in total, and this counterbalances the reduction in fat."
One thing experts agree on is that the formula to achieve weight loss is simple: the more energy you put in, the more you have to burn off. Says Dr Caryl Nowson, a nutrition lecturer at Deakin University, "Any diet that has a negative energy balance [you burn off more than you consume] will result in weight loss, wherever those kilojoules came from: protein, carbohydrate, fat or even alcohol. It is the law of physics. If we are taking in more energy than we are expending, we will gain weight."
Excerpt from a feature by Alix Johnson, Sunday Life, December 2002