![]() ![]() More than a third of the country is now obese, making the U.S. Even the increasing rates of exercise haven’t been able to keep us healthy. Deaths from heart disease have fallen–a fact that many experts attribute to better emergency care, less smoking and widespread use of cholesterol-controlling drugs like statins–but cardiovascular disease remains the country’s No. Nearly 1 in 10 American adults has the disease, costing the health care system $245 billion a year, and an estimated 86 million people are prediabetic. The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes increased 166% from 1980 to 2012. We cut the fat, but by almost every measure, Americans are sicker than ever. ![]() Nearly four decades later, the results are in: the experiment was a failure. But with nearly a million Americans a year dropping dead from heart disease by the mid-’80s, we had to try something. We were embarking on a “vast nutritional experiment,” as the skeptical president of the National Academy of Sciences, Philip Handler, put it in 1980. MORE: Give (Frozen) Peas a Chance–and Carrots Too From 1977 to 2012, per capita consumption of those foods dropped while calories from supposedly healthy carbohydrates increased–no surprise, given that breads, cereals and pasta were at the base of the USDA food pyramid. Families like mine followed the advice: beef disappeared from the dinner plate, eggs were replaced at breakfast with cereal or yolk-free beaters, and whole milk almost wholly vanished. ![]() Grocery shelves filled with “light” yogurts, low-fat microwave dinners, cheese-flavored crackers, cookies. The food industry–and American eating habits–jumped in step. The National Institutes of Health recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 cut fat consumption, and that same year the government announced the results of a $150 million study, which had a clear message: Eat less fat and cholesterol to reduce your risk of a heart attack. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued its first dietary guidelines, and one of the primary directives was to avoid cholesterol and fat of all sorts. ![]()
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