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It’s hard to say who fired the first shot in the War on Fat. But for as long as most of us can remember, fat has been blamed for heart disease, high blood pressure and obesity. The government can take its share of the blame here. In 1980, the first ever dietary guidelines promoted a carb-heavy approach to eating, while we were told that our fat consumption should be as minimal as possible. And the pen-pushing bureaucrats had the results of a ritzy, $150 million research study to “prove” that fat was the enemy…or so they told us.
We now know that such studies were conducted with what Prescription Thugs director Chris Bell calls a “Results-R-Us” mentality. This means that they were designed to yield certain data to justify a presupposition – in this case, that fat is harmful – while any information to the contrary was omitted or minimized in the findings. Yet despite more recent and reputable studies finding little to no correlation between saturated fat consumption and the incidence of illness, subsequent iterations of the government-issued food pyramid continued to advise that we cut out fat as much as possible. Once the propaganda machine had convinced the majority of people that fat was bad, the food industry had little trouble finding buyers for low-fat alternatives. In fact, by the mid-90s as many as one in three packaged food items claimed to be “low fat” or “fat free.”
Recently, we’ve discovered that it’s actually sugar that contributes to all the diseases that used to be blamed on fat, and a whole lot more. It may even fuel the growth of cancer. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that it took a grand, unholy alliance to keep the truth about sugar quiet for so long. New reports reveal that Big Sugar suppliers banded together as early as the 1940s to shift the blame for weight gain and disease from their own products onto fat. While it might be foolish and irresponsible to compare this to the tobacco company cover up (if you haven’t watched The Insider, the Russell Crowe and Al Pacino film on this topic, you should) of the link between smoking and cancer, the tactics and blatant disregard for the health of the American public are eerily similar.
When it comes to their health, your kids should be far more afraid of the sugar-laden candy they’re about to consume by the bucket-load on Halloween than the spooky costumes that their friends will be wearing. To overcome the faulty sugar=fun equation that has sucked us and our children in, it’s not enough for parents to make more responsible choices at home. If the government wants to atone for its nutritional guideline sins, it should ban fast food advertising and institute the proposed soda tax that, of course, the Big Sugar barons are fighting tooth and nail.
Schools also need to follow the lead of what British chef Jamie Oliver has done in the UK and get vending machines out of the hallways and sugar-fest items off cafeteria menus. This isn’t to say that our kids should never have any sugar or that parents and teachers need to become, as some opponents to school wellness committees have dubbed them, “cupcake Nazis.” But if our culture is to make use of the revelation that it’s sugar, not fat, that’s the biggest nutritional foe our kids face, we need bold actions at the institutional level. Otherwise we’re treating them to the ultimate trick, the consequences of which will go far beyond Halloween-night frights.
