Scott, do you have any links to carefully controlled studies showing it was primarily fat free dieting that caused the weight gain in the 80s and 90s and not simply the fact that several billion people around the world suddenly had easy access to enormous amounts of very inexpensive highly processed junk-food carbs?

I've been trying to find data. I found one saying in the early 2000s, of the 40% or so of people who diet at any point in time, at most about 2% were trying fat free diets.

If you extrapolate that back to the 1980s and 90s, even adding to it, you have something like 40% of the population becoming overweight and maybe 5 to 10% doing low fat diets.

If you have any statistics I'd appreciate it. I've heard this idea for years that it was primarily the low fat diet craze that led to the increase in overweight. I've never found any data for it, and there's SO much data that correlates the enormous increase in weight around the early 80s with the enormous increase in availability of cheap, easily availability highly processed junk food.