If you’re feeling completely confused about whether you should cut fat from your diet, you are not alone. But here’s the bottom line: Fat does not make you fat or sick.
So, why do so many people believe that fat is bad for you and causes heart attacks? This all started in the Dr. Key’s Seven Countries Study decades ago that examined heart risk based on lifestyle and dietary habits. He found that in the countries where people ate more fat — especially saturated fat — there were more cases of heart disease, and he concluded that the fat caused the disease. But here’s the problem with this study: Correlation is not causation. Just because both fat intake and heart disease were higher among the same population doesn’t mean the heart disease was caused by the fat consumption. Here’s another way to look at it: Every day, you wake up and the sun comes up, but although these events happen at the same time, you waking up doesn’t cause the sun to come up. A study that observed this would show a 100 percent correlation between these two events, but it would be wrong to conclude that you caused the sun to rise.
Mark Hyman, MD
James' World 2 