alt Hacker NewsThe 80’s anti fat diet was mostly clogged arteries before we had all these anti cholesterol drugs and research showing how little impact dietary cholesterol has.
US obesity simply wasn’t as common (15% in 1985 vs 40% today) and at the time most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place even earlier. Further many people that recently became obese didn’t have enough time for the health impact to hit and the increase of 2% between 1965 and 1985 just didn’t seem that important. Thus calories alone were less vilified.
Put another way when 15% of the population is obese a large fraction of them recently became obese (last 10 years), where at 40% the obese population tends to be both heavier and have been obese for much longer. Heath impacts of obesity depend both on levels of obesity and how long people were obese.
The government and medical groups were advocating lower fat diets for CVD reasons, but among the mainstream it took hold overwhelmingly because it was seen as a mechanism for weight reduction or management. A gram of fat has twice the calories of a gram of protein or carbs, and this was widely repeated (yes, I was alive then). Similarly, if being fat was bad (and yes, it was viewed as very bad), then fat as a component of food must similarly be bad.
Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch".
"Thus calories alone were less vilified."
I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.