Fat-Free And Fatter ‘Fat-Free Food’ Does Not Mean ‘Good For You’ - Many People Are Realizing This Mistake

It seems like every time you turn around these days, yet another fat-free food has appeared on supermarket shelves. Literally thousands of new products are flooding the market and raking in boom-time profits for food manufacturers.

All of these fat-free choices appeal to the millions of Americans who want to get healthier or lose weight. But just because it’s fat-free doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Many products liberated of their fat are loaded with extra sodium and sugars to make up for the flavor that goes with the fat.

The lure of low-fat, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too ad campaigns encourages us to forget that fat-free doesn’t mean calorie-free.

California nutritionists Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole say it’s a growing problem. Too many consumers see a fat-free label as an invitation to eat all they want: They think it doesn’t count. But the problem with this kind of thinking is that it can actually lead to overeating. In fact, some consumers are going so whole-hog on all the new low-fat and fat-free goodies that they are consuming far more calories than they need and still not eating a balanced diet.

Resch and Tribole say chronic dieters will eat fat-free coffeecake for breakfast, fat-free frozen yogurt for lunch, pretzels in the afternoon and a low-fat frozen meal for dinner. Their diets may be low in fat, says Resch, but they are also low in fiber and other important nutrients.

Meanwhile, even with all this fat-free eating going on, we don’t seem to be getting any thinner. In fact, we’re getting fatter. Calorie consumption is up and obesity rates throughout the country are at an all-time high. Nearly 60 million Americans are now seriously overweight. If this were tuberculosis, says Dr. F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, professor of medicine at Columbia University, it would be called an epidemic.

Blame it on sedentary living, fast food and double-wide portions to-go. Ironically, the no-fat food boom may also be helping to tip the nation’s scales. One out of four people recently polled by the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), believe they can eat more of reduced-fat foods than they can of the regular variety. The FMI survey also found that people who are preoccupied with fats are more likely to overlook the sugar, salt and calorie content of the foods they select. People are getting fat, observes Todd Schlapfer, a naturopathic physician in Coeur d’Alene, but not necessarily on fat.

Back in the fat-free lane, the word is that a healthy diet means eating no fat at all. But you do need some fat in your daily diet - about 30 percent, according to federal dietary guidelines. Consider some of the vital roles fat plays: It is a component of every cell membrane in the body, especially of the brain and nervous system.

It transports vitamins A, D, E and K.

It preserves body heat.

It helps to form hormones.

It keeps skin and tissues youthful and healthy by preventing dry skin and scaliness.

But fat’s toughest task, notes Schlapfer, is in trying to survive our endless strategies to get rid of it. Not to mention that when it comes to raising healthy kids, fat is one of those essential nutrients still-developing hearts and minds can’t do without. That’s why it’s important that low-fat snack foods don’t entirely replace healthy snacks with some amount of natural fat content such as nuts and seeds, avocados and bananas, yogurts and cheese, whole-grain bread and muffins.

Dietary fat may be public enemy No. 1, according to the Calorie Control Council, but don’t assume that fat-free eating is the only way to go. After all, sugar is fat-free, but you can’t live on it. Food manufacturers like to remind us that products like Ritz crackers, Cocoa Puffs and Pepsi have always been fat-free. Yes, but they have always been low in fiber, vitamins and essential nutrients, too.

So how do we make the most of all the reduced-fat food choices now available to us without overdoing it? In their recent book, “Intuitive Eating” (St. Martin’s Press, 1995 $6.99), nutritionists Resch and Tribole suggest the following:

Enjoy reduced-fat foods as an adjunct to, not instead of, a healthy, varied diet.

If two foods are similar in taste and calories, but one is lower in fat grams, by all means go for the one that has less fat. But avoid low-fat brands that are higher in sugars and sodium than other reduced-fat products - these are mostly empty calories.

Try not to let fat-free snack foods take the place of fruits and vegetables, the original low-fat foods.

In many cases, you might even be better off to pump up the old willpower and stick with the original. Ironically, many dieters discover that if they were to have the real version of a food, they’d end up eating much less. Although they may contain more fat, real foods also provide us with satiety cues, the satisfied feeling of fullness that tells us it’s time to stop eating. The result is that cravings are often reduced and fewer total calories consumed.

MEMO: Candace Burch is a free-lance writer based in Coeur d’Alene.