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Interesting article in the Economist 1843 magazine this week.
For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure
By the 1930s the calorie had become entrenched in both the public mind and government policy. Its exclusive focus on the energy content of food, rather than its vitamin content, say, went virtually unchallenged.
By the late 1960s, obesity was becoming a pressing health concern as people became more sedentary and started eating highly processed foods and lots of sugar. As the number of people who needed to lose weight grew, changing diets became the focus of attention.
So began the war on fat. Because counting calories was seen as an objective arbiter of the health qualities of a foodstuff, it seemed logical that the most calorie-laden part of any food item – fat – must be bad for you. By this measure, dishes low in calories, but rich in sugar and carbohydrates, seemed healthier. People were increasingly willing to blame fat for many of the health ills of modern life, helped along by the sugar lobby: in 2016, a researcher at the University of California uncovered documents from 1967 showing that sugar companies secretly funded studies at Harvard University designed to blame fat for the growing obesity epidemic. That the dietary “fat” found in olive oil, bacon and butter is branded with the same word as the unwanted flesh around our middles made it all the easier to demonise.
A US Senate committee report in 1977 recommended a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet for all, and other governments followed suit. The food industry responded with enthusiasm, removing fat, the most calorie-dense of macronutrients, from food items and replacing it with sugar, starch and salt. As a bonus, the thousands of new cheap and tasty “low-cal” and “low-fat” products tended to have longer shelf lives and higher profit margins.
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie
For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure
By the 1930s the calorie had become entrenched in both the public mind and government policy. Its exclusive focus on the energy content of food, rather than its vitamin content, say, went virtually unchallenged.
By the late 1960s, obesity was becoming a pressing health concern as people became more sedentary and started eating highly processed foods and lots of sugar. As the number of people who needed to lose weight grew, changing diets became the focus of attention.
So began the war on fat. Because counting calories was seen as an objective arbiter of the health qualities of a foodstuff, it seemed logical that the most calorie-laden part of any food item – fat – must be bad for you. By this measure, dishes low in calories, but rich in sugar and carbohydrates, seemed healthier. People were increasingly willing to blame fat for many of the health ills of modern life, helped along by the sugar lobby: in 2016, a researcher at the University of California uncovered documents from 1967 showing that sugar companies secretly funded studies at Harvard University designed to blame fat for the growing obesity epidemic. That the dietary “fat” found in olive oil, bacon and butter is branded with the same word as the unwanted flesh around our middles made it all the easier to demonise.
A US Senate committee report in 1977 recommended a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet for all, and other governments followed suit. The food industry responded with enthusiasm, removing fat, the most calorie-dense of macronutrients, from food items and replacing it with sugar, starch and salt. As a bonus, the thousands of new cheap and tasty “low-cal” and “low-fat” products tended to have longer shelf lives and higher profit margins.
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie
