ANN ARBOR---As the U.S. Department of Agriculture begins to establish new dietary guidelines for the year 2000, a new University of Michigan study suggests low fat diets aren't always the most healthy.
"Fat is back,'' said Adam Drewnowski, director of the Human Nutrition Program at the U-M School of Public Health. While most nutrition experts continue to recommend low-fat diets that are high in vegetables and fruit, dieters are making the most of meat, chocolate and ice cream. The latest diets for weight loss have skipped starches in favor of more protein and fat, but all is not lost.
"Diversity and variety contribute as much to diet quality as does low fat content,'' Drewnowski said. "A monotonous diet of two or three low-fat foods may do wonders for your cholesterol levels, but will do nothing for your mental health or your quality of life. The premier U.S.D.A. recommendation is to enjoy a variety of foods. That is the one guideline that we should follow.
"As nutrition experts, we should recognize that some fat in the diet is not necessarily a bad thing."
Drewnowski will present his research findings on Tuesday (April 21) at the Experimental Biology Meeting in San Francisco.
He and a team of U-M researchers, including Dr. E.C. Chung, a visiting scholar from Korea, recently explored new ways to measure diet quality. They examined the overall diet of men and women in the United States based on diet diversity (consuming foods from the five major food groups), variety (total number of foods consumed per day) and moderation (following U.S.D.A. food guidelines). The team examined the eating habits of 1,637 men and 1,576 women over two days. The statistics were taken from the 1995 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes
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Contact: Amy Reyes
amelynr@umich.edu
(734) 647-4411
University of Michigan
21-Apr-1998