ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 24, 1996 TAG: 9612240114
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Personal Health
SERIES: This is the first of two columns on fat consumption and weight
control
SOURCE: JANE BRODY
Fat.
Until quite recently that three-letter word had a decidedly positive connotation.
A rich man was a fat cat. A fat check was much to be wished for, especially before the holidays. A fat baby was said to be beautiful and healthy-looking.
My parents and grandmother spent my skin-and-bones childhood years trying to fatten me up. They stuffed me with sticks of butter, bars of Velveeta cheese and cans of evaporated milk. (The effort failed, incidentally, until adolescent hormones took over.)
In the last few years, however, the country has gone hog wild over low-fat, nonfat and fat-free foods. Supermarket shelves groan with cakes, cookies, chips, dips, cheese, sausage and that quintessential no-no, ice cream, minus most or all of the fat.
People think that by avoiding fat they will automatically shed pounds. But many who once ate sparingly of such foods now indulge freely in their low-fat or nonfat versions, sometimes downing servings two or three times as large as those they would eat of the full-fat food. As a result, many Americans desperate to shrink their widening girth are getting fatter still on fat-free foods and little or no exercise.
The recent introduction of snack foods prepared with an indigestible fat, Olestra, is likely to feed the desire to ``have one's cake and eat it too'' even further without doing a single thing to improve Americans' dietary habits.
So far few Americans seem to have noticed that, except for avocados, fruits and vegetables are naturally low in fat or free of fat and offer the much-coveted bonus of helping to protect against heart disease and cancer.
The fat-free frenzy has prompted one author to cry ``Enough!'' In his newly published, cheeky (without the tongue in it) book ``Eat Fat'' (Pantheon, $24), Richard Klein, a somewhat corpulent Cornell University French professor, strives to reintroduce body fat as esthetically desirable to a society that now deplores every inch that can be pinched.
Further, Klein is one of a small but growing number of anti-dieters who believe that indulgence may have paradoxical health benefits. Feel free to eat fat, he maintains, and you might even eat less.
A biological drive?
Humans, some researchers maintain, are hard-wired to desire calorically dense foods. And fat is the most caloric, providing nine calories per gram as against four calories per gram of sugar, starch and protein and seven calories per gram of alcohol.
People are born with a ``fat tooth'' that is even stronger than their sweet tooth, especially in adulthood, concludes Dr. Adam Drewnowski, director of the human nutrition program at the University of Michigan.
``Even children learn to prefer calorically dense foods; they are more efficient at satisfying hunger,'' he said.
He has shown that the consumption of sweet and high-fat foods can be decreased by pretreating people with an agent such as naloxone that blocks the release of opiates in the brain. This observation may explain why people are driven to consume fats and sweets and why some people might even become ``addicted'' to them.
Furthermore, ``fats enhance the flavor, richness, aroma and mouthfeel of foods; fat-free foods don't carry flavors as well,'' Drewnowski said.
The idea behind Olestra is to preserve the flavor and texture of fat on the tongue without having the consumer absorb the calories. The problem is that more than fat leaves the body with Olestra; fat-soluble vitamins do too, and the bowel can have trouble containing the fatty waste.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for humans to crave fat because it is an efficient way to consume and store calories, providing needed energy to carry people through the lean times, said Dr. Jules Hirsch. Hirsch is an obesity specialist at Rockefeller University in New York.
Biochemically speaking, he said, ``it's cheaper to store calories from fat than to make fat out of carbohydrates.''
The societal push
Worldwide, there is a strong correlation between fat intake and income. ``As nations become richer, their diets change,'' Drewnowski said. ``The amount of fat and sugar consumed increases - usually as meat and other animal products and caloric sweeteners - at the expense of complex carbohydrates.''
Throughout most of human evolution, calorically dense foods were in relatively short supply, which kept the species lean. That is still the case today in poor countries. But as the standard of living rises, fat consumption and its consequences rise as well.
Drewnowski cited the example of modern Japan, a nation long regarded as a near-paragon of nutritional virtue with a national diet that derived only 10 percent to 15 percent of its calories from fat. But, he pointed out, in the last 25 years fat consumption in Japan has increased threefold, and that country is now having a problem with childhood obesity. The same is happening in Brazil, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and China.
``You can't blame it on genetics,'' Drewnowski said. ``It's a function of national income. Now, in the United States, we're trying to uncouple income from fat consumption, to stay rich but consume a healthier diet.''
There is growing evidence that many Americans are tired of trying to squelch their high-fat appetites and are eating more steaks, cheeseburgers, french fries, chocolates and pie a la mode.
Steakhouses recently have got a new lease on life. McDonald's scratched the unpopular McLean burger and has bet its corporate dollar on the Arch Deluxe, a burger sporting 570 calories (610 with bacon) and 31 grams of fat. Add another 510 calories and 26 grams of fat from the super-size french fries and you have more than obeyed Richard Klein's dictum to ``Eat Fat.'' But at what price?
NEXT WEEK: The risks of the high-fat diet.
LENGTH: Long : 107 linesby CNB