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A low-fat diets study to almost 50,000 healthy older women found that reducing fat intake alone does not significantly reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke, breast cancer or colorectal cancer. Also in the US, the study found that reducing fats without reducing calories does not lead to significant weight loss, and its findings go against 30 years of conventional dieting wisdom.

Marcia Stefanick, a professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Centre and an author of the report said, “Just switching to low-fat foods is not likely to yield much health benefit in most women.”
She said, rather than trying to eat low-fat foods, women should focus on reducing saturated fats and trans fats – the so-called “bad” fats – while maintaining their intake of “good” fats such as vegetable oil, olive oil and fish oils.”

The study results which were reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, did hint at some possible benefits from reducing fat intake of a health products.
Women on a low-fat diet who had the highest consumption of fats at the beginning of the study showed the biggest decrease in breast cancer risk.
Those who reduced fat intake had a lower incidence of polyps, a precursor of colorectal cancer.
And those who achieved the lowest rate of fat consumption showed the lowest risk of heart disease.
But in each of those cases, however, the reductions were not “statistically significant” – meaning they could have occurred by chance.

Another fact from the study is that an increased consumption of carbohydrates and grains is safe and healthy – contradicting the claims by proponents of low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins that high carbs increase the risk of diabetes.

For the study, 48,835 healthy women with an average age of 62 were enrolled. 40% of them were given intensive counselling to help them reduce their fat intake, while the remainder continued with their normal diet. Even with the counselling, most were not able to reduce fat consumption from the average of 35 per cent of their calories at the beginning of the study to the target of 20 per cent.