In 1996, the summer after I graduated from college and rescued a man from his balcony, I was on a crusade. It wasn’t just personal, it was political. I was out to get rid of all food containing fat.
It was the fat-free 1990s, when everything from Swedish Fish to Entenmann’s cookies was marketing itself as “fat free food!” Having gained a few pounds in college, I was determined to lose the weight.
“Fat makes you fat!” screamed every pop nutrition book I read. I became addicted to Susan Powter, the blonde spiky-haired mom who recommended we keep fat to six grams a day. Not saturated fat, all fat. That’s almost impossible to do while continuing to consume food.
Convinced by Powter, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Neal Barnard, and others that fat was the enemy, I religiously counted my fat grams. I ate pasta with no sauce, rice and beans with no cheese, and at Subway I’d even forgo the little black olives I loved because they contained fat.
I did lose weight. I also just about lost my mind. I was hungry all the time, constantly scanning labels for fat grams, demanding vinegar with no oil on my salad when I ate out, and my young tabby cat learned to chase chickpeas across the floor like prey because I ate so many of them. I would’ve been just as likely to boil myself in oil as to cook with it.
My skin got dry and scaly, my hair was limp, and protein in my diet was close to nonexistent, a fact that my diet gurus said was fine as I was nowhere near the medical condition of kwashiorkor, wasting away due to protein deficiency.
Years later I discovered first protein, then fat. I lost weight, gained muscle, and felt better than I ever had in my life. It took some time to get over my ingrained fat phobia, but when I did, I felt balanced for the first time in years.
While I got over my fat phobia, the rest of the country was still hearing that we should avoid saturated fats, and meanwhile they were getting fatter and fatter with every passing year. Doctors urged people to eat nonfat dairy and avoid red meat. The USDA Food Pyramid, the guide for among other things school lunches, ordered us to base our diet on grains and fill plates with bread, rice and pasta, adding meat on top and not at every meal. Highly processed carbohydrate foods were in, and many people, including most children, lived almost entirely on them.
Now Robert Kennedy Jr. the Current Secretary of HHS has flipped it upside down. With the 2026 inverted Food Pyramid, meat, butter and cheese are all back on the table. What’s out is highly processed food, fat-free or otherwise. Instead of low-fat yogurt with sugar added, Kennedy urges us to eat full-fat dairy and real fruits and vegetables. Many traditional nutritionists don’t like it.
Biochemistry professor and nutrition expert Richard David Feinman, PhD, is no fan of Junior, as he calls him, but cautions us not to make what lawyers call “The Reverse Mussolini Error.” Just because Mussolini made the trains run on time, it doesn’t mean we want them to be late. Feinman, who introduced me to the health benefits of very low carbohydrate dieting, had this to say about the new guidelines: “Context is important. For public health and general info for the population, emphasizing protein and exonerating saturated fat will be a great benefit—if the message is attended to. In the context of serious science, nutritional biochemistry, scientific logic, the opinion of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli on such productions has become popular: This isn’t even wrong.” Full of contradictions and errors, it’s primarily a political document.
As a person with a Master’s in Public Health and experience working in the field, I know there’s a big difference between general public health recommendations and what may be right for any given individual. I’m glad that I can read medical studies and evaluate evidence for myself. But I agree with Feinman that the guidelines are a wonderful step forward for those who rely on more general advice. It’s about time we stopped demonizing healthy foods like beef and cheese while worshipping the fat-free popsicle.