Low-Fat “Health” Snacks Are a Big Fat Lie

Author: Archit Tripathi / Source: did you know?

Summertime is here, which means it’s time for cookouts, t-shirts, tank tops, shorts, trips to the beach… and feeling terrible about my soft, doughy body. Thankfully, I’m not alone, as millions of Americans struggle with their weight every year, trying out all sorts of crazy workouts and diets in order to attain that “ideal physique.

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If you’ve been alive on this planet in the last 50 years or so, you’ll know that one thing that’s been recommended to us from countless sources is to eat a diet that’s low in fat. Not only is excess fat consumption bad for your weight, it also leads to heart problems and other serious diseases. Thankfully, there’s a wealth of healthy, low-fat alternatives to some of our favorite snacks. Isn’t that nice of the food companies to help us out like that?

If you believe all that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you down in Brooklyn. It turns out that low-fat diets aren’t all that effective at helping you lose weight or be healthier. They can actually be quite bad for you. In order to understand why, let’s got to go back to the 1950s when this whole health food movement started.

Health History

During the late 1950s, incidents of heart disease started to rise in America. The issue of heart health became especially prominent after President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. As a result, scientists started looking into the possible links between heart disease and diet, which is pretty much where everything went off the rails.

You see, it was a different time back then. People were a lot more trusting in general, and – more importantly – prominent scientific publications like the New England Journal of Medicine didn’t require authors to disclose the source of their funding. The sugar industry took advantage of this by literally paying prominent scientists the modern equivalent of $50,000 to publish a review of research on fat, sugar, and heart disease.

The data was cherry-picked to ensure the blame fell squarely on fats, and eventually published in the aforementioned New England Journal of Medicine.

By getting these findings published in several prominent journals and magazines, the sugar industry was able to get ahead of the conversation on diet and heart disease for decades to come and ensure that their product was painted in a relatively harmless light as just being empty calories that could be bad for your teeth if you overdid it on the candy consumption.

Doing this had a twofold advantage for Big Sugar. Not only did it keep blame and bad publicity away from them, it also helped create a whole new market to exploit. An increasingly health-conscious America started demanding less fat in their food, but when you remove fat from food, it tastes like cardboard. To make it taste appealing again, it’s pumped full of sugar. Thus, Big Sugar essentially helped create the now multi-billion dollar “health” food industry.