A Food Lover's Guide To Fat

Most scientists say that it's way too soon for people to put their faith in one fat as opposed to another, because -- sorry -- more research is needed. ""I'd rather see the data accumulate over a few years,'' says Greenwald. The exception may be the monounsaturated oils. Many experts are willing to recom-mend a change from butter to olive or ca-nola oil, as long as total fat remains low. ""If you switch from saturated fat to olive oil, there's no question that it's probably a benefit to your heart,'' says John Potter, head of the Cancer Prevention Resource program at the Fred Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle. ""But if you're already eating a huge amount of fat, just switching to olive oil wouldn't solve the problem.'' Olive oil on toast in the morning? The diehards for monounsaturates swear by it, but if the thought is repellent, use a small amount of butter or margarine. That little of anything doesn't matter.

Everybody I know has cut way back on fat. How can we be eating too much of it?

Lisa Young knows. a doc-toral candidate and adjunct professor of nutrition at New York University, Young can detect a fat gram at 40 paces. ""Look!'' she exclaims at lunch in a Fifth Avenue restaurant. She reaches over to the next table, swipes a linen napkin and gently presses it over her plate of grilled vegetables. Then she holds up the napkin, now stained yellow with oil. ""You can blot pizza, too,'' she says. Young is no anti-fat crusader -- she's a devotee of peanut butter and ice cream, among other foods -- but she believes one reason people are eating too much fat is that they don't know what they're eating. In the course of her doctoral research she has studied both restaurants and street food, and her findings indicate that it's the hidden fat that puts the bulge in the American diet. There's no sense patting yourself on the back for choosing chicken instead of steak, for instance, if you go ahead and eat most of an entire chicken. ""In the '80s and '90s, portion sizes blew up, and that's when people blew up, too,'' says Young. ""I saw bagels blow up, muffins, restaurant portions. People just aren't paying attention.'' Bagels used to weigh a couple of ounces, the same as two pieces of bread, she says. ""Now they're two or three times that size. If we had ordered the salmon here it would have been 10 ounces -- that's enough for two people.''

For a truly powerful invitation to overeat, look no farther than the alluring term ""fat free.'' Consumed at the rate of one a day, SnackWell's fat-free chocolate cookies do no harm. But they're packaged 12 to a box -- ""And around here, we call that a single serving,'' says Mark Gutsche, spokesman for Nabisco. He's joking -- probably -- but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that Americans devour fat-free junk food, most of it loaded with sugar, as if calories had never been in-vented. ""I saw a lady in a grocery store buying a box of Entenmann's fat-free cookies,'' says Young. ""She must have eaten 14 cookies in the line.'' Everyone knows by now that there's no free lunch, but hope springs eternal for dessert.

Nobody fools me -- I always read food labels.

Hah! nice try. you probably drink 2 percent milk, too. After all, the label says it's ""low fat,'' just like skim and 1 percent. But that label is deceptive. Two-percent milk gets about 36 percent of its calories from fat -- that's nearly twice as much as 1 percent. (Whole milk gets 50 percent of calories from fat.)