Fat Chance: What You Haven't Been Told About Low-Fat Diets

For years, we’ve been told that following a low-fat diet had numerous advantages, including staving off heart disease and cancer. And, of course, the primary motivation for jumping on the low-fat bandwagon was usually more immediate – weight loss. 

In February, the Women’s Health Initiative released the results of a study indicating that the effect of low-fat diets wasn’t quite so clear-cut. In fact, the WHI’s 15-year study that tracked more than 19,000 post-menopausal women said that a low-fat diet did little to help prevent either heart disease or cancer. 

While those headlines caused many women to rethink their diet strategies and sacrifices, they didn’t tell the entire story. So before you reach for that second slice of pizza, here are some things you need to know: 

According to reports released by the Associated Press, the women participating in the study didn’t necessarily follow the diet plan to the letter. Although the women were asked to cut their daily fat consumption to just 20 percent of their total caloric intake – down from an average of 35 percent when they started – few of them were able to make that cut. Six years into the study, only a few were actually hitting that goal and, for the most part, the diet group was eating only eight percent less fat than the comparison group. Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, heart chief at the National Institutes of Health, noted that the dieters didn’t make significant enough changes to show any benefits to the heart. 

Additionally, the study was well under way before research surfaced to indicate that the kind of fats consumed are just as important as the amount of fats consumed. The women in the study didn’t differentiate between the types of fats. What researchers know now – but didn’t know when the study was launched – is that there are “good” and “bad” fats. Fats like olive oil, fatty fish and nuts contain heart-healthy fats, which are completely different from harmful fats like saturated fats and trans fats.