Hazards in Dietary Fats

The realization that nutritional and environmental factors are important in the onset and control of disease has some interesting social and economic ramifications. The medical and scientific community have been pushing diets with less fat for some time, which the food industry has perceived as a sufficiently stable economic basis for developing new fat-free foods and fat substitutes. What if the preservatives and carcinogens that wind up in our food, and in the food of the experimental animals used to reach these conclusions, are the actual problem, and not the fat itself? Under these circumstances, more fat in the diet translates into more retained fat-soluble dietary preservatives and carcinogens and an accompanying increase in health risk.

When environmental contamination of the fats we eat is considered, the concept of using "nine" grams per serving as the cut-off criterion for selecting low-fat foods is sound; "nein" (phonetically "nine") is German for "no", and it has been suggested that we just "say no" or "nein" to foods containing more than "nine" grams per serving. However, a certain amount of fat and fat-soluble nutrients is desirable in our diets.

Home	Overview	People	Journal	Nutrition
Environment	Treatments	WWW Links	Outline	e-mail us