Eating Fat Makes You Fat. Right? Wrong.

By Augustine, Founder of The Larder

For fifty years, fat was the villain.

It was removed from our food, replaced with sugar and refined carbohydrates, and we were told that eating less fat would make us leaner and healthier. Governments issued guidelines. Food companies reformulated products. A generation grew up believing that fat — the thing humans had eaten for hundreds of thousands of years — was dangerous.

And yet. Obesity rates climbed. Diabetes exploded. Metabolic disease became the defining health crisis of the modern era.

Something was very wrong with the theory.

Where the myth came from

In the 1950s, an American physiologist named Ancel Keys proposed that dietary fat — particularly saturated fat — caused heart disease. His research was widely publicised, politically influential, and deeply flawed. Keys cherry-picked data from countries that supported his hypothesis and ignored data from countries that didn't. His conclusions were contested by other researchers at the time, but the low-fat narrative took hold primarily cause corporations could profit off the results with all their packaged products. 

By the 1980s it was government policy. By the 1990s it was a global 'truth'. And with it came the mass replacement of natural fats with sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, refined starches, and industrial seed oils.

The result was not better health. It was the opposite.

What the science actually says

In 2010, a landmark meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition examined data from 21 prospective studies following 347,747 subjects over 5 to 23 years. The conclusion was unambiguous.

Siri-Tarino et al. found that there is "no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD."

This was not a fringe finding. It was a rigorous meta-analysis of nearly 350,000 people. And it directly contradicted fifty years of public health messaging.

What actually causes fat storage

Fat storage is not driven by dietary fat. It is driven by insulin.

Insulin is the hormone your body releases in response to carbohydrate consumption. When you eat sugar or starch, your blood glucose rises, insulin is secreted to clear it, and your fat cells are signalled to store energy rather than release it. When insulin is chronically elevated — which happens on a high-carbohydrate diet — your body is in a near-permanent state of fat storage.

Dietary fat does not trigger this response. Fat has almost no effect on insulin. Eaten without carbohydrates, fat does not signal fat storage — it actually triggers fat burning.

This is basic endocrinology, and the clinical evidence backs it up. A 2018 study by Hallberg et al. published in Diabetes Therapy followed 262 adults with type 2 diabetes through a continuous care intervention based on carbohydrate restriction and nutritional ketosis. After one year, the results were striking.

"Carbohydrate restriction markedly improves glycemic control in patients with type 2 diabetes." Patients on the low-carbohydrate intervention lowered their HbA1c from 7.6 to 6.3%, lost 12% of their body weight, and reduced their diabetes medication use. 94% of patients who were prescribed insulin reduced or stopped their insulin use.

These are not marginal improvements. These are people reversing the markers of a chronic disease — by removing carbohydrates and replacing them with fat and protein.

Why fat makes you lean

When you remove carbohydrates and replace them with fat, insulin drops. When insulin drops, stored body fat becomes accessible as fuel. Your body stops storing and starts burning.

Fat also does something carbohydrates cannot do consistently — it satisfies. Fat and protein together trigger satiety hormones that tell your brain you are adequately fed. The constant hunger that drives overeating on a high-carb diet quiets. Many people eating a high-fat, low-carb diet find themselves eating less without trying — not because they are restricting, but because they are genuinely not hungry.

What about cholesterol?

This is the next question almost everyone asks, and it deserves a direct answer.

The relationship between dietary fat, cholesterol, and heart disease is far more complex than the original low-fat hypothesis suggested. The Siri-Tarino meta-analysis found that intake of saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk of CHD, stroke, or CVD, even after consideration of age, sex, and study quality.

Many people who switch to a high-fat, low-carb diet see improvements in their cholesterol profile — specifically reductions in triglycerides and increases in HDL, both associated with reduced cardiovascular risk. The Hallberg study found that dyslipidemia and markers of inflammation and liver function improved in patients following a low-carbohydrate dietary intervention.

This is not medical advice. Individual responses vary, and anyone with existing cardiovascular conditions should work with a doctor. But the blanket claim that eating fat raises your risk of heart disease is not supported by the current evidence.

The foods we were told were healthy

Low-fat yoghurt. Reduced-fat peanut butter. Skimmed milk. Margarine. Fat-free salad dressing. All are advertised as healthy, but look at the ingredient lists. When fat is removed from food, it is almost always replaced with sugar, starch, or industrial additives to restore palatability. The low-fat product is frequently worse for your metabolism than the full-fat original.

Full-fat dairy, fatty cuts of meat, eggs, butter, all animal fats — these are foods humans have eaten for our entire evolutionary history. They are not the cause of the metabolic crisis. The foods that replaced them are.

What this means for you

If you have been avoiding fat because you were told it would make you fat — you were misled.

Fat does not make you fat. Insulin makes you fat. And the primary driver of insulin is carbohydrates — not fat.

Eating adequate fat, in the absence of sugar and refined carbohydrates, does not cause weight gain. It causes weight loss, stable energy, reduced hunger, and improved metabolic health.

This is what The Larder is built on. Not a trend. Not a hack. A return to the way humans are designed to eat.

— Augustine

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References

Siri-Tarino, P.W., Sun, Q., Hu, F.B., & Krauss, R.M. (2010). Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 91(3), 535–546. PubMed

Hallberg, S.J., McKenzie, A.L., Williams, P.T., et al. (2018). Effectiveness and safety of a novel care model for the management of type 2 diabetes at 1 year: an open-label, non-randomized, controlled study. Diabetes Therapy, 9(2), 583–612. PubMed

Taubes, G. (2007). Good Calories, Bad Calories. Knopf. A comprehensive review of the science behind dietary fat, carbohydrates, and metabolic disease.

Volek, J.S. & Phinney, S.D. (2011). The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living. Beyond Obesity LLC.