January is Fat-Free Living Month!

[COLOR="SeaGreen"]“Did you ever see the customers in health-food stores? They are pale, skinny people who look half dead. In a steak house, you see robust, ruddy people. They're dying, of course, but they look terrific.” -- Bill Cosby[/COLOR]

I'm a news junkie. I often flip from news channel to news channel on the TV, checking out the different takes on the news of the day. In the last few days I've been seeing features and discussions about January having been proclaimed "Fat-Free Living Month" by the USDA.

There are no "different takes" on this particular story. The talking heads are all in lockstep, agreeing that if everyone took the low-fat message to heart and ate nothing but diets in which fat intake was strictly controlled, obesity, diabetes and other related health concerns would disappear. Heart attacks would no longer be a problem. In this new Utopia, apparently the only remaining cause of death would be accidents. And the billions of dollars spent on health care in the U.S. would no longer be needed and could be diverted to better uses.

I say "Baloney!" I spent almost three years on a strict low-fat diet. The results weren't pretty. I had constant gnawing hunger pangs. A large part of my diet was carbs, supposedly the body's "preferred" source of energy, but I had nothing that even resembled git-up-and-go. And I added about 25 pounds to my already-overweight body. Still, my switch to low-carb was vehemently opposed by my doctor on the grounds that it was both dangerous and ineffective. His solution for my poor results from low-fat was to "tighten up on the diet."

In the past year, two of my acquaintances have been put on strict low-fat diets, one of them after a heart attack and bypass surgery and the other in an effort to control Type 2 Diabetes. Both of them are as miserable as I was, and both are gaining weight in the form of unhealthy-looking flab. But their doctors insist that low-fat diets are a necessity and will be for the rest of their lives. The diabetic even asked her doctor to let her try low-carb, and received a lecture about how "dangerous" low-carb diets are -- despite the fact that the American Diabetes Association last year approved low-carb as a method of weight control for diabetics.

I'm not trying to say that there is no place for fat-free diets. They may be the best thing for some people. But that's no reason for a blanket condemnation of any other way of eating. I know some people who seem to live happy, healthy lives cutting back on fats and cholesterol in their foods. But it's not for all people -- just as low-carb may not be for all people. We're not cookie-cutter people turned out on assembly lines, and there's no one cookie-cutter diet turned out on an assembly line to fit all people.

Now if we could only convince the USDA and the medical community of that!