Does low-fat food cause weight gain?

Nutritionist Jonny Bowden contends that low fat diets caused the obesity epidemic. I suspect he's right on some counts. He goes back to the start of the low-fat craze.

"The race was on to produce low-fat and no-fat foods, and to engineer the saturated fat out of everything. This, in turn, led to a slew of "food-like" products, manufactured and processed edible substances bearing little resemblance to whole foods, and to idiotic experiments like margarine. Add to this witches' brew the invention of high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils (to replace saturated fat) and you had the perfect dietary storm."

Sally Fallon wrote about the fallacies of low-fat cooking in her book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. She tells us how

• Your body needs old-fashioned animal fats.
• New-fangled polyunsaturated oils can be bad for you.
• Modern whole grain products can cause health problems.

Disclosure: If you buy her book from the link above, I get a small credit from Amazon which I can eventually use for buying my own books.