Fat And Sugar: The Best And Worst Of 2014

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Jonny Bowden was a true anti-fat believer. He would send egg white omelets back to the kitchen if the plate carried even a trace of yolk “because,” he says, “I knew I was going to get a heart attack.”

That was back in 1991. Today, the tables have turned. In the past year alone, studies have come out vindicating fat, even the notoriously “bad” saturated type. Low-fat diets are out and high-fat diets have never been more in.

“There’s a growing awareness that fat was wrongly demonized for many of the epidemics we’re seeing,” such as heart disease and diabetes, says Bowden, a nutritionist in Woodland Hills, California, and co-author of “The Great Cholesterol Myth.” He’s is now so pro-fat that he puts butter in his morning coffee, eats pastured bacon regularly and endorses real lard over canola oil in cooking.

Meanwhile, sugar is only getting more hate. A team of scientists from the University of California–San Francisco, for one, launched the website SugarScience.org this year to raise awareness about the harm of sugar. Their work is based on more than 8,000 research papers on the topic.

Put simply, “sugar is definitely the worst thing in the world,” says Catherine Taylor, a registered dietitian at VIDA Fitness and Aura Spa in the District of Columbia.

Here’s a closer look at some of the research behind 2014’s hero and villain:

The Best: Fat

Low-fat diets might not be the way to go for heart health or weight loss, suggested one study published in September in the Annals of Internal Medicine. For the study, researchers put about 150 adults on either a low-carb or a low-fat diet for a year. Of the participants who stuck with the diets for the year, those on the low-carb diet lost more weight and lowered their risk for heart disease more than participants who followed a low-fat diet.

“Definitely the evidence has been building” against low-fat diets, says one of the study’s lead authors, Lydia Bazzano, a professor of nutrition and director of the Center for Lifespan Epidemiology Research at Tulane University. “Not all fat is good, but certainly good fats shouldn’t be limited.”

What constitutes “bad” fat seems to be narrowing as well. A study published in November in the journal PLOS ONE is one of several that have questioned whether saturated fats deserve their less-than-stellar reputation. In the study, researchers put 17 people at risk for heart disease and diabetes on a low-carb, high-fat, diet for three weeks. Then, they upped participants’ carb intake and reduced their total fat and saturated fat intake every three weeks for 18 weeks, keeping total caloric intake the same. The results? The more carbs and less fat in the diet, the more a fatty acid appeared in the blood that’s linked to obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other diseases. In other words, it was consuming carbs – not fat – that was associated with higher saturated fat levels in the blood.

A meta-analysis of more than 70 ​studies published in March in the Annals of Internal Medicine also gave saturated fat proponents something to boast about: People who eat more saturated fats such as those found in fatty beef and cheese may not be at higher risk for heart disease, and people who eat more polyunsaturated fatty acids – found in some fish, nuts and seeds – may not be better protected from it. Heart health recommendations to eat less saturated fats and more “healthy” fats, then, don’t seem to be supported by studies, the researchers concluded.

However, the analysis was flawed – it contained errors that have since been corrected and received backlash from experts who argued it omitted some key studies and misreported others. Still, fat’s reputation came out on top since that piece of the story made fewer headlines than the study’s original conclusions.

The Worst: Sugar

The more added sugar you eat, the more likely you are to die from heart disease – it’s that simple, according to a February study in JAMA Internal Medicine that looked at trends ​between the late 1980s and 2010 and included tens of thousands of Americans. The researchers also found that the average American today eats at least 10 percent of his or her calories from sugar, and 10 percent of Americans get at least 25 percent of their daily calories from sugar – that’s plenty more than the American Heart Association’s recommendations for women to cap their daily intake at 100 calories and men at 150 calories a day. And no one gets off easy: The researchers found that the heart risks associated with sugar was similar regardless of age, sex, race and ethnicity.

Some experts go as far as to say that sugar is more to blame for high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke than salt. In an analysis of the research to date published this year in Open Heart, researchers argue that dietary guidelines to avoid processed foods are well-advised, but the real danger of those foods lies in their sugar – not salt – content.

"It is time for guideline committees to shift focus away from salt and focus greater attention to the likely more-consequential food additive: sugar," the authors wrote.

Taylor agrees. She’s in the midst of a 21-day sugar-free streak, satisfying her sweets cravings by mixing frozen berries in her plain Greek yogurt and cocoa powder and bananas in her oatmeal. “It showed me that it’s possible to go without sugar in situations I thought it wasn’t,” she says. “We really need to give ourselves a chance to try it a different way … and show ourselves that we don’t need it,” she says.

The Caveats

Despite fat’s newly appreciated merits, many experts are hesitant to prescribe a​ diet full of bacon and butter. Trans fats, for one, remain in the doghouse, recently linked with a poorer memory in young and middle-aged men by a study presented at the American Heart Association’s annual conference in November. Plus, there are other, more nutrient-dense ways to get your fat fix, experts say.

“If we could shift [diets] to good essential fatty acids and eat more ground flaxseeds or ground chia seeds, or more nuts and seeds or fish and olives and olive oils, we’d do better than if we were sitting there eating bacon,” says Melissa Buches​, a naturopathic doctor in Los Angeles.

Indeed, the nut, seed and olive-oil heavy Mediterranean diet enjoyed a top year, too. A study of over 4,000 women released in the British Medical Journal this month concluded that women whose diets most closely resembled the Mediterranean diet had longer telomeres – a cellular marker of longevity.

As for sugar? If a dollop of honey is what it takes to make plain Greek yogurt palatable, go for it – thenutritional benefits of the yogurt outweigh the dangers of sugar. Naturally-occurring sugars such as those found in fruits and vegetables shouldn’t be avoided either. “The more whole food the diet has the better,” Buches says.

The bottom line, says Taylor, is that there’s still much more to learn. “Humans are really hard to research,” she says. “We have to take all of this with a grain of salt because we can’t put [people] in a box and control exactly what they eat and how much they sleep to really know what the variables are.”

By Anna Medaris Miller