It was all the latest craze - the way to lower your risk of heart disease and stroke (and who wouldn't want to do that!) was to simply reduce your dietary fat intake. This started the fixation on lowering dietary fat consumption way back when people were asking "what is dietary fat?'

It went like this: to lower your risk of stroke or heart attack, you were supposed to lower your dietary fat intake across the board, no matter what type of fat it was. If it was fat, you were not to consume it.

Then this stroke prevention and heart attack reduction advice got into types of fats. So the next type of fat to be demonized was saturated fat. If you'd read the media reports, you'd have thought it was the devil incarnate. But guess what? The research demonstrated that saturated fat was actually one of the healthy fats. Not only that, but also that it made a difference about the type of fat you consumed. To deliver the punch line, it turns out that if you want to label some fat as the devil incarnate, it has to be trans fats - those manufactured ones that were supposed to save us all from strokes and heart attacks. So the very industry that demonized healthy fats and tried to get us to consume trans fats (their products) instead, turns out to be the problem!

Here's how the Harvard School of Public Health put it:

"By our most conservative estimate, replacement of partially hydrogenated fat in the U.S. diet with natural unhydrogenated vegetable oils would prevent approximately 30,000 premature coronary deaths per year, and epidemiologic evidence suggests this number is closer to 100,000 premature deaths annually."

Still, many people haven't heard the news. In fact, some are back still thinking dietary fats are really bad for you, but of course, they're not.

Although there are many more than just nine health problems caused by low dietary fat intake, here are nine of the top symptoms that are a direct result of low fat or no fat diets:
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Pamela Levin, R.N.
September 13, 2011

Tags: dietary fat what is dietary fat dietary fats saturated fat saturated fats healthy fats types of fat dietary cholesterol fat dietary fat daily intake

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