A Food Lover's Guide To Fat

""There's a lot of controversy in this area.'' (John Potter)

It sounds self-evident. Eat fatty foods and you get fat. After all, the legendary ease with which the body converts chocolate cake to stored fat is no fluke; it's nature's finely tuned mechanism for sustaining humans through winter hunger without so much as a woolly mammoth chop to gnaw on.

But the process may not be that simple, as the sad history of dieting shows. Back in the '50s, people dieted by counting calories: if you ate few enough calories, you were hungry, but you lost weight (at least until you started eating normally again). By the '80s, dieters were counting fat grams instead. Fat calories are converted to body fat much more readily than are calories from carbohydrates. ""If you want to keep trim, cutting down on fat is a good step,'' says Greenwald.

But if it were really that easy to lose weight by cutting down on fat, fewer diets would end in depression and failure. ""Probably the most telling tale is that the average person eats 10 percent fewer calories now than a hundred years ago,'' says Kelly Brownell, a psychologist at Yale specializing in eating disorders. ""Yet the prevalence of obesity has doubled.'' Our breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks and diets may be low-fat, but we sure aren't. Willett says low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets don't work in the long run, because replacing a fat calorie with a carbohydrate calorie doesn't make any difference to the body after the initial shock. ""Over a period of months and years, it's very clear that the body readjusts,'' he says. Deprived of eating fat, in other words, the body learns to store as fat whatever calories are at hand. Unfortunately, there's research to back up both the efficacy and the futility of low-fat dieting. The only approach to weight loss that seems beyond debate is one so old it was probably first scratched in cuneiform: eat less, exercise more.

So what do I DO about fat?

First, stop thinking about fat so much. ""It may make more sense to think about the whole diet, rather than focus on a single nutrient,'' says Potter of the Hutchinson Center in Seattle. ""I don't want to deny the importance of fat, but people consuming a low-fat diet think they've solved all the problems, and that's not the case.'' A great deal of evidence suggests that fruits, vegetables and grains protect against cancer and heart disease far more effectively than a fat-free Fig Newton and make a smarter guideline than fat grams. ""You don't have to think, what is the fat content of this banana?'' says Potter. ""It isn't an issue.'' With these foods in the center of the plate, and fattier foods used sparingly, it doesn't much matter if an occasional steak goes on the grill.