Have we been really wrong?

jayce54321 wrote: »

"Over the past decade, research has shown that a diet rich in healthy fats can be better for people, particularly if those fats help offset consumption of foods containing high levels of salt, sugar and refined grains...
Low-fat diets have had unintended consequences, turning people away from healthy high-fat foods and toward foods rich in added sugars, starches and refined grains. This has helped fuel the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes in America"

http://www.myhealthytoday.com/html/topicdetails.asp?pid=1&topic_id=24529&puid=139049&flag=1

Yep, we were wrong!
People into health and fitness have always known this. As for the human herd, no, but word is getting out.
Those who desire the truth can find it.

Welcome to 2015...

It was the T Factor diet that purported that fat makes fat. So we had fat free cookies. Atkins said that carbs make fat. He had folks eating bacon and lettuce. Now we know that a diet of mostly whole foods, healthy fats, and balance along with a generous dose of exercise makes all the difference on health.

And yet there are still people, albeit a minority of people, who get healthier cholesterol readings if they decrease the amount of fat in their diet. People are not all alike.

This isn't new.

FunSizedKJ wrote: »

This is something that confused me about MFP when I first started with it. If you look under the Nutrition tab, under the nutrients, the "Goal" for the unsaturated fats are 0 but they allow saturated fats, my "Goal" for those is 14 g.

Unsaturated fats are the ones that have the most health benefits, why is our goal to consume 0 then? Saturated fats are bad, so why am I aiming to eat any?

I can see that being confusing! I think that it is trying to say limit your saturated fats to 14g a day (probably based on RDA guidelines) but there isn't really a limit of unsaturated fats other than over all fats. So you "should" eat up to 14g of saturated fats and fill the rest of your daily fat needs with unsaturated. It would be less confusing, I'm sure, if the just subtracted the 14 from your total fats and used that for unsaturated, but say you only had 7g of saturated ... you can have those extra 7 in unsaturated rather than not at all. (I hope this helped clear it up rather than make it more confusing).

There are people who believe that saturated fats aren't as bad for us as we've been told, as well, and that we only need to watch overall fats. There are also many who look at fat (and protein) as minimum levels to meet. I know that there is a certain amount of essential fats we need to consume, so they have at least something of a valid point. FTR, I only track overall fats when paying attention to macros.

Pinnacle_IAO wrote: »

jayce54321 wrote: »

"Over the past decade, research has shown that a diet rich in healthy fats can be better for people, particularly if those fats help offset consumption of foods containing high levels of salt, sugar and refined grains...
Low-fat diets have had unintended consequences, turning people away from healthy high-fat foods and toward foods rich in added sugars, starches and refined grains. This has helped fuel the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes in America"

http://www.myhealthytoday.com/html/topicdetails.asp?pid=1&topic_id=24529&puid=139049&flag=1

Yep, we were wrong!
People into health and fitness have always known this. As for the human herd, no, but word is getting out.
Those who desire the truth can find it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "always", but I was taught in reputable college courses in the 1980s that of course fat makes you fat, and that low fat diets were by far the best choice.

Underlying all that was of course still conservation of energy, but the thinking was that, with 9 kcal/g for fats vs 4 kcal/g for carbohydrates, people should eat more of the latter to get more food for fewer calories.