So that’s really interesting. I didn’t read it thoroughly, but what I skimmed seems to make my point. Notice the title is NOT that Low Fat diet reommendations were a cause.

I think there’s absolutely no doubt, for the rather small percentage of the population who DID eat low fat diets AND didn’t think at all about the absurdity of replacing healthy food with junk food, “the US Low fat diet recommendations CONTRIBUTED to DECLINING HEALTH.”

But the facts she brought out strongly supported my understanding — she detailed how people were driving more, eating more junk food (vast amounts of people eating junk food who never gave a 2nd thought to things like “fat content.”

Also, title didn’t say anything about obesity, it said low fat recommendations contributed to declining health.

So at least, one might safely say the following:

1. The primary cause of the sudden increase in the 70s, 80s and 90s in overweight and obese individuals was the dramatic increase in caloric consumption of highly processed, junk food carbs.
2. For a very small subset of the population, no more than 10% at most, possibly under 5%, choosing low fat diets AND ignoring the nutritional quality of the food they substituted, contributed to weight gain.

There’s NO evidence that I’ve EVER seen that people who chose low fat diets who were CONSCIOUS of substituting purely healthy foods (which were actually what the government was recommending), became overweight in large numbers.

I might note also, that until 2000 or later, dieting was overwhelming found among women. So how to account for the dramatic weight gain among men in the 1980s?

It seems to me, if one does not have an agenda to promote keto and similar diet regimes, it’s so obvious it seems odd to search for another reason: Men overwhelmingly increased their consumption of highly processed, high sugar foods.

Anyway, I hope you at least hesitate in the future before writing something that leads people to believe that the SOLE reason for the increased weight gain was low fat diets, which is impossible since only a small percentage of the people who became overweight went on low fat diets to begin with, AND of those, many chose healthy foods and whether or not they lost weight, this alone would not have caused them to have substantial increases in weight (since low fat diets were popular at least 30 years prior to the 80s, and htere was no substantial weight gain.

In fact, it just occurred to me — given the popularity of low fat diets for decades before the 80s, it’s pretty easy to isolate the one primary factor for the world wide obesity crisis:

The enormous increase in easy to obtain, very inexpensive, highly processed, high sugar junk food.

Thanks for the link, it was quite helpful.