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June 5, 2026 · 7 min read

Fat of The Land - Part 2 - How the War on Fat Made Us Sick

By Raiden DeLuca

For about fifty years the official advice was simple and confident. Fat is killing you, so cut it. Eat less butter, less red meat, fewer eggs, and build your plate around bread, cereal, pasta, and vegetable oil instead. And we listened. As a country we actually did the thing. Fat fell from close to 45 percent of our calories in the mid-1960s to around 32 percent by the end of the century. We bought the low-fat yogurt, the fat-free cookies, and the margarine. And we got sicker than any generation before us.

That is not an opinion, it is the part of this story that should make you angry. So let me walk you through how it happened, and who profited while the rest of us got sick.

Where the war on fat came from

In 1977 a Senate committee released a report called Dietary Goals for the United States, and in 1980 the government published its first official Dietary Guidelines. Both told Americans to cut fat, especially saturated fat, and to rebuild the diet around carbohydrates. The thinking behind it, the diet-heart hypothesis, was that fat and cholesterol in your food raised the cholesterol in your blood and clogged your arteries.

It sounded reasonable. It also rested on far weaker evidence than the confidence of the announcement let on. A shaky hypothesis became a national mandate, and that mandate reshaped our country’s food in the span of a few years.

Follow the sugar money

Here is where it stops being an innocent mistake. In the 1960s the sugar industry quietly paid Harvard researchers to publish a review that downplayed sugar’s role in heart disease and aimed the blame squarely at fat. That is not a theory I am floating. Researchers later found the internal documents and laid the whole thing out in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016. Part of the science that built the case against fat was bought and paid for by the sugar industry to protect sugar.

Think about what that set in motion. While fat was being driven out of our food, sugar strolled in through the front door wearing a halo. When you pull fat out of food it tastes like nothing, so manufacturers poured in sugar and refined starch to make the low-fat products edible. We ended up with a food supply quietly soaked in the one thing that actually drives metabolic disease. We were told to fear the wrong nutrient, and the right one was handed a pass it is still enjoying today.

The numbers nobody wants to sit with

So we followed the advice. We cut the fat. Here is what happened on the other side of it.

In the late 1970s, around 15 percent of American adults were obese. Today it is roughly 40 percent. Over that same stretch, adult diabetes climbed from about 5 percent of the population to around 12 percent, which is tens of millions of people. We did precisely what the guidelines told us, we ate less fat as a share of our diet than our grandparents ever did, and obesity nearly tripled while diabetes more than doubled.

I want to be fair about heart disease, because that was the whole reason fat was put on trial in the first place. Deaths from heart disease did fall over this period. But they fell mostly because medicine got dramatically better at treating it, through statins, stents, bypass surgery, and a steep drop in smoking, not because a low-fat diet rescued anyone. Meanwhile the metabolic disease that feeds heart trouble, the obesity and the diabetes, went through the roof. We did not solve the problem. We got better at patching people up after it hit them, while quietly creating more of them.

What the studies actually found

If the low-fat advice were right, the big and careful studies would have proven it by now. They did not.

The largest test ever run was the Women’s Health Initiative, which put nearly 49,000 women on a low-fat diet for years. It did not meaningfully reduce heart disease, stroke, or overall cardiovascular disease. A major 2010 review of the evidence on saturated fat concluded there was no significant proof that it raises the risk of heart disease at all. And the PURE study, which tracked people across eighteen countries, found that higher fat intake was tied to lower death rates, while high carbohydrate intake tracked with higher death rates. The exact reverse of what we were promised.

I am not claiming this proves fat is some miracle food, and I am talking about real fat here, not the industrial stuff we will get to later. What it proves is narrower and more damning than that. The certainty we were sold, that confident decades-long campaign against fat, was never backed by the evidence it claimed to have. The case was thin, the trials did not deliver, and the advice stayed in place anyway.

Why this matters beyond fat

This is the same pattern I keep running into on this blog. A good thing God made, real fat from real food, got demonized, while a genuinely harmful thing got protected, and the whole thing was driven by money and defended by trusted institutions long after the truth was known. Remember that even Ancel Keys, the man most responsible for the fat scare, admitted as early as 1997 that the cholesterol you eat does not matter unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit. And yet the official cap on dietary cholesterol was not dropped until 2015. Sit with that gap. For eighteen years the warning stayed on the books exactly as it was, known to be wrong by the very man who lit the panic, and still shaping what people put on their plates.

I am not telling you to throw out all authority and trust no one. I am telling you to notice that authority and truth are not the same thing. Scripture says to test everything and hold fast to what is good. It does not say to swallow whatever the experts of the moment declare and call that faith. Discernment is part of stewardship, and when the people in charge of the food got it this wrong for this long, the work of thinking it through lands back on you.

Where we go from here

We were misled. Not briefly, and not by accident in every case, but for decades, on one of the most basic questions there is, which is what we should eat. That is worth sitting with, and worth remembering the next time a sweeping food rule gets handed down with total confidence.

My goal here is not to leave you cynical, it is to teach you. Now that the air is clear, we can do the work that actually matters, which is understanding what fat is and how to eat it well. That is where this series goes next: the different types of fat and which ones earned their reputation, the all-important balance of omega-3 and omega-6, and the truth about the industrial oils that quietly took the place of the real thing.

That is the part that actually helps you, and it is where we are headed.

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