‘Low fat food is a con’

Low fat food has taken over our supermarkets and our whole eating ethos, says journalist Lowri Turner, and we’ve been duped into more unhealthy eating habits. Real food and healthy fats is the path to achievable weight loss

Want to live until you’re 80, run a marathon, slink into that pair of size 10 jeans? Well then, a low fat diet is supposed to make you healthier, fitter and, yes, slimmer. It’s the big fat food lie we’ve all swallowed for the last 17 years.
Women in particular have bought into the low fat food makes you slim myth. As a result, a sort of fat phobia has developed whereby being seen to order a coffee with whole milk, full-fat humus or tucking into proper, runny Brie is to brand yourself as slightly mad and out of control.
We’ve been told that being lean and slim is to be in control and approved of, and that the route to this approval lies in following a low fat diet. How else can we secure the extreme thinness that we see all around us in magazines, on film and on fashion hoardings?
And yet, since the now famous Food Pyramid was unveiled in 1992 (the natty little graphic with which the US Government, followed by the British one, has sold us the idea of low fat food) we’ve got fatter. Over a quarter of the UK adult population is now obese, with the estimated cost of obesity to the NHS £1 billion.
The British dieting industry, by the way, is now worth over £2 billion, which kind of shows you which business you want to be in, doesn’t it? And this doesn’t even include its huge and ever-more bloated adjunct, the low fat food manufacturing sector.
Visit any supermarket and the shelves are groaning with low fat this, reduced fat that and fat free the other. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing intrinsically evil about low fat foods. An apple is a low fat food, so is a lentil. But these are naturally-occurring low fat foods. They have not been whipped up in a factory by someone with a shower cap on their head.
The problem comes when Dr Frankenstein decides to take a normal food and transform it into a low fat food because, and here’s a big secret, taking the fat out of something often makes it look and taste funny.
Fat is a key factor in how a food looks, tastes and feels in the mouth. It also affects processing, handling and storage. So, if you take it out, you may have to replace it with a whole chemistry lab full of other gunk, such as modified starches, gums, emulsifiers, extenders and synthetic oils and lipids. Mmmm, that low fat muffin sounds good, now, doesn’t it?
For the dieter who doesn’t really care about E-numbers but just wants to shed the pounds, the news gets worse. Low fat foods aren’t even necessarily that low calorie. Many are high in sugar and salt, again added to make them palatable.
However, as more and more medical research is demonstrating, we need fat – the right sort found in oily fish, nuts, seeds, olive oil and avocados – to keep us healthy. These fats are essential for our skin, hair and hormone and blood sugar balance. Fat in food could even help us lose weight as it slows stomach emptying, so keeping us feeling fuller for longer after a meal.
Even if we do aspire to losing weight, low fat is not the way to do it. A diet of real food, including the right fats, will achieve much better, lasting results. Ask a Masai tribesman. It is estimated that he eats a pound of animal fat a day, but you don’t see many of them down at WeightWatchers, do you?