Fashion

Photography by Natasha V. Food styling by Heather Shaw for judyinc.com.

The fat has long been sucked out of our food in the name of health. Rani Sheen weighs the newest thinking on good fat.

Imagine a world where you got to the front of the coffee shop line and didn’t feel compelled to say the word “skinny” before the word “latte.” Or where, facing down the legions of yogurt options at the grocery store, your hand bypassed the zero per cent Greek yogurt, landing instead on the full-fat version. The idea that fat is bad for us has become so all-pervasive that it is now fixed firmly in our minds that full-fat dairy, bacon or even a hefty serving of avocado are flabby demons waiting to send chub to our waists and clog our arteries. But a growing school of thought is suggesting that actually, it isn’t fat that makes us fat.

The low-fat movement took off in the early 1980s, largely informed by the “Seven Countries” study begun in 1958 and published in 1980 by physiologist Dr. Ancel Keys (who popularized the Mediterranean diet and BMI as an indicator of body fat). It showed a strong link between dietary fat and heart disease, though Keys has since been accused of disregarding countries that didn’t fit the hypothesis, plus he only studied men. Other research followed, and in 1984 the National Institutes of Health recommended all Americans over the age of two reduce their dietary consumption of fat from 40 to 30 per cent of their total calories. Canada followed suit. This ushered in the era of margarine, skim milk and boneless, skinless chicken breasts.
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