Those Low-Fat Lies

Cutting the fat out of our diets will not necessarily cut the weight, according to a new study that has the skinny on low-fat diets.

“Our obsession with total fat has completely failed us for weight loss,” Deirdre Tobias, the lead researcher on the new study from Boston’s Brigham Women’s Hospital, told LifeZette.

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Tobias and her colleagues at BWH and Harvard analyzed 53 published studies that involved more than 68,000 adults. The researchers found that low-fat diets were no more successful for weight loss than higher-fat counterparts like low-carb eating.

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The hype about low-fat plans for weight loss, in fact, may have done more harm than good.

“It allowed people to make too many poor food choices, and rates of overweight and obesity skyrocketed as a result,” Tobias said.

The hype around low-fat plans for weight loss may have done more harm than good.

The reason low-fat has failed us is all over our grocery store shelves.

“More often than not, people were swapping out sources of good fats for processed refined grains and sugar, which clearly got us nowhere,” Tobias said.

Results of the meta-analysis came as no surprise to 39-year-old Jennifer Valdivia. The Ponte Vedra, Florida, woman and mother of two young children lost 102 pounds through diet and exercise. She has kept almost all of it off for the past eight years.

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Valdivia said she found great success with a more calorie-based, healthy food plan through Weight Watchers. Though she has struggled with weight her entire life, she said she never gave the low-fat dieting craze a try.

“I definitely think eating a low-fat diet would have made me feel deprived, and I don’t think that’s healthy,” she told LifeZette. “When you make a lifestyle change you have to say, ‘Can I do this for the rest of my life?’”

The BWH study suggested that this is an important question for people trying to lose weight to ask themselves. Tobias said the BWH study tells us we need to change the conversation about weight loss.

“It’s time to discuss healthy food and overall patterns that we can incorporate every day for life, not just the next few weeks or months,” she said.

If eating healthy, low-fat foods is working for you long-term, however, there’s no reason you should stop, Tobias added.

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Just don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

“Our findings emphasize we need to start thinking in terms of foods and overall healthy patterns for maintaining a healthy body weight, rather than focusing on individual nutrients,” she said.

Calories, of course, still count, Tobias said.

“To lose weight, we need to reduce our calories in and boost our calories out. But to sustain this in the long-term, just cutting back on fat isn’t the most effective strategy,” she said. “Let’s shift the conversation about diets to good healthy foods,” she said.

The results of the study are published in Friday’s edition of The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.