I have to watch my calories, for sure. But I'm not following a low-fat or even a low-saturated-fat diet. On the days I've tracked or planned and pre-measured my meals and snacks, I've gotten 40 to 60 percent of my calories from fat, roughly half of them from saturated fat.
I've always sort of used "I'm breastfeeding" as a kind of excuse for this, since nursing children do need plenty of fat, including saturated fat, and fatty acid profiles of breastmilk are affected by the mother's diet. I'm beginning to think I don't need an excuse anymore.
If there really isn't any strong data showing that a diet rich in both saturated and unsaturated fat is dangerous to health — if it's really just a (seemingly-well-reasoned) hypothesis that isn't borne out by evidence — why should I intervene in my diet to remove either of them? I get plenty of fiber, plenty of fruits and vegetables, practically all my starches are whole grains… if real butter, coconut oil, and even red meat (!) are part of my diet too, and I'm not consuming too many calories, it's hard to see how this is a problem.
Back to the topic of messages: Mark, who is pretty in touch with nutritional recommendations and nutritional research through his engineering job at a major food company, has recently been wondering if the best public-health-messages might be the ones that instruct people to eat good things rather than the ones that instruct people to avoid bad things. You know — "eat whole grains" and "eat five fruits and vegetables a day," rather than "Don't eat fatty meat" and "Don't use butter and cream."
I wonder if those positive messages have a better track record of being evidence-based than do the negative ones. When there's ambiguous evidence about a possibly "bad" thing, do policymakers reason "Since we don't know, it's safer just not to do it" and recommend avoiding the possibly bad thing — while waiting until something is certainly good before recommending seeking it out?
I wonder if people feel better and more capable about being told to do a good thing for themselves than about being told to stop doing something that feels good but is "wrong."
And I wonder how that correlates to the tendency for, say, desserts to be promoted with adjectives that imply moral turpitude ("Sinfully Chocolate Fudge Cake," "Decadent Cheesecake.") Is there maybe a tendency to rebel a little bit against Those Who Know What's Good For Us when it comes to reaction to these "don't" messages? Is the same rebellion there in reactions to the "do" messages?
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