"We have expanded the market for obesity and diabetes treatments and found more ways to die from cancer. Wasn't the low fat, high carbohydrate movement supposed to spare us the very outcome we find ourselves faced with?"

For decades, dietary fat has been the scapegoat for all that is wrong with what America eats. The oft repeated warnings to, "Cut the fat," have become more than just a cornerstone of nutritional advice, they have become sacred scripture, forever in our minds and upon our lips, an incantation to be uttered when temptation bends our will.

We have adopted a nutritional belief system that demonizes fat with the fervor of religious zealotry. It is a faith we practice daily, making fat-free food choices with a numbing sense of duty that approaches fundamentalist fanaticism. We pray to a pantheon of saints, the celebrity idols of pop culture given to us by the entertainment and fashion industries. Their perfect bodies and blissful lives are a constant reminder to us that we are less and they are more. We learn that salvation and thin thighs are reserved for the true believer in a fat-free lifestyle. And so we blindly submit our bodies, our minds, and our spirits to this belief and in a misguided act of love, we sacrifice our children's future upon the alter of our faith.

Lighting our way along the path of righteousness and fat-free living is the dietary priesthood, a cabal of ecclesiastics drawn from the pharmaceutical, medical, food, and government industries. They are our prophets, and profit they do, upon the pyre of our collective ignorance.

In time, we succumb to the ravages of a lifestyle shaped by our beliefs. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, the plagues of modern man befall us, and yet, we soldier on, obediently offering up prayers of supplication against the evil of dietary fat, while we medicate ourselves into oblivion. In the end, in spite of our piety and selfless adherence to the tenets of the faith, we have ultimately become the very thing we despise the most, namely, fat. Ours is a tragic tale, but it was not always this way. There was a time when things were different.

At the same time, another race which had begun much earlier, was also gaining momentum. In the preceding decades, heart disease had risen in the ranks as a high profile killer. The race was on to find the cause and the cure. This race spawned the generally held belief that 'high' cholesterol caused heart disease. The hypothesis stated that if you reduced fat and cholesterol in the diet, you could reduce the buildup of excess cholesterol in the body and prevent the onset of disease. There was scant evidence then to support the belief that cholesterol causes heart disease, just as there is today.

Some factions of the scientific community took great pains to point out that an oversimplified message to "eat less fat" based on an unproven hypothesis might be dangerous as it was well known that dietary fat served a critical role in the proper function of the human body. Those voices were buried beneath the pride, prejudice, and politics of the time. The promoters of the "Diet/Heart Hypothesis" won the day and ensured that dietary fat would become the "unloved stepchild" at America's dinner table.

Backyard gardens were not uncommon in this country then. In my own family, out in the desert valley of south-central Arizona, our garden was an unexpected oasis of earthly delights. There we grew tall stalks of sweet yellow corn, impatient for melted butter and the company of a tender rack of ribs. Deep green collards, honeyed melons, snap beans and sweet ripe tomatoes too delicious to wash before eating. Our efforts were rewarded with a rich return on the difficult investment of gardening in the hardened desert clay. We bought log-sized loafs of longhorn cheese from the store and fresh eggs from our neighbors, whose errant rooster I sometimes pursued whenever he took a fancy to go exploring. Our milkman delivered whole-fat cow and goat's milk, cold from the dairy in thick glass bottles. We kept our icebox and a large horizontal freezer stocked with a side of beef, numerous chickens, a turkey or two, pork from the squeal to the tail, and fat fresh fish purchased at the grocery store or when we were lucky, drawn from the depths of the cold desert lakes that lie in the northern mountains. "Low fat dieting" was not part of our lexicon or of anyone else we knew.

We were generally healthier then, bereft of a full-time working automobile, money for cabs or even buses, we walked most places. The food we ate was satisfying and provided the nutrients needed to fuel a day's worth of tasks. Overweight people in those days, though not unusual, were not the norm. To see an obese person usually meant waiting until the county fair came to town where the socially insensitive "freak show" was staged just off the main midway. There, for the price of a bag of popcorn, one could earn the privilege of gawking at the fat lady or the fat man and marvel at the expansive capacity of the human body. Now all one need do is go to the mall or look in the mirror. Progress.

As the 70s progressed, our diets were transformed. Food manufactures realized that there was a growing market for snack foods. At the same time, Madison Avenue was discovering the magic of targeted marketing based on demographic and psychographic profiling. People of every color and cultural taste were afforded the honor of seeing people, just like themselves, happily swilling cola and fast food in television commercials. The famous Pepsi commercial that showed a united nations of multihued singers, holding hands and drinking Pepsi in, "perfect harmony" was a marvel of manipulation that made drinking Pepsi as noble a calling as saving the whales. Generous government agricultural subsidies ensured a steady supply of base ingredients to manufacture the sticky sweet and trans-fatty treats that Americans were consuming in ever increasing quantities. New markets were identified, products were developed and advertising campaigns were launched. The race to get America eating was on.

On the home front, my family's diet was rapidly transitioning from mostly whole foods to convenience foods. Home baked breads were replaced with cheap convenient store bought bread that turned to paste in your mouth. TV dinners were cheap and easy to prepare. Adulterated foods that were either deficient in fat or comprised of poor quality fats slowly replaced our dietary staples. Powdered milk, margarine and vegetable shortening was less expensive and more convenient than whole milk, butter, and lard. Hot oatmeal with butter and whole milk was replaced with cold cereals that were nutritionally suspect and packed a wallop when it came to the extra carbohydrates and calories. Sugared drinks slowly began to replace milk.

By the 80s and 90s America had completely bought into the shaky logic of the diet/heart hypothesis. We were low fat and loving it. What we didn't realize was that as we reduced the quality and quantity of our fat intake, we increased our intake of high carbohydrate foods, the sugars and starches, to make up the difference. Parallel advances in technology made our lives easier as our cities emptied themselves in a mass migration to the suburbs. We were becoming a nation of sedentary people, spending more time in our cars on the commute to the "burbs" while eating more high calorie nutrient-poor foods.

The current advice from the experts is designed to exclude most beneficial fats from our diet. We are advised to load up on trans-fatty oils and fibrous carbohydrates so that we feel full. Now consider the logic of this reasoning: rather than eating a balanced meal that includes a mix of nutritious meats, produce, dairy, and grains thereby reaching a point of satiation, we should instead, bloat ourselves with gassy fruits and vegetables in a sadistic attempt to curb our appetite. If we were truly eating a balanced meal, a real balanced meal that includes sufficient amounts of the right kind of dietary fat, our appetite wouldn't need to be suppressed. The fact that we're hungry all the time has been portrayed by the experts, with puritanical self righteousness, as proof of a personal weakness, when in fact what it really means is that we have failed to properly meet our body's nutritional needs.

Humans have been consuming fat for most of our time on this planet. Odd that it has only been over the last 30 or 40 years, with the explosion of fat-free, highly processed, convenience foods loaded with simple carbohydrates, that we have somehow managed to get fatter. We have expanded the market for obesity and diabetes treatments and found more ways to die from cancer. Wasn't the low fat high carbohydrate movement supposed to spare us the very outcome we find ourselves faced with?

Eating low-fat doesn't guarantee you'll gain weight. Sometimes, it's just the opposite. The debilitating effects of a low-fat lifestyle is sometimes manifested in it's most extreme form: the aspiring super model. With their skewed self image in tow, they may be found haunting fashion outlets across the country from the discount strip malls of Nowhere, USA, to the trendy boutiques of New York and Los Angeles. Absent the benefits of professional makeup artists, digital imaging technicians, and silicon enhancement, they limp, throughout our modern temples of consumption, gaunt and hollow eyed, with sunken cheeks and pallid skin. Like day-walking vampires, they drift in a perpetual state of nutrient starvation, their frail bodies sometimes bereft of many of the physical markers of womanhood. The sight of these skin-ghosts only tells half the story, the half that can be observed with the eye. The rest, what is happening to their bodies beneath the skin, does not become apparent until later.

The current emphasis on low carbohydrate (translation: low junk food) dieting has finally begun to shed some positive light on dietary fat, even though some proponents of reduced carbohydrate eating still demonize fat either out of ignorance, fear or greed.

It will be difficult envisioning dietary fat in role different from that of antagonist, a role scripted by the dietary priesthood, more for political and economic gain than anything else. The first step then is to educate yourself and base your decisions on what you know, not on what someone else wants you to believe. You may be branded a heretic and a troublemaker for espousing an opinion that is different from the status quo. But if like me, you've already been down the low-fat road, you know there's nothing there for you, you've learned the hard way that the way forward, is ahead.