Dietary fats are a vital component of the regular diets of nearly all mammals. They collectively comprise one of the three macronutrient food sources — along with protein and carbohydrates — that are eligible for consumption. However, for several decades of the 20th century, millions of human beings fell prey to advertising campaigns and misinformation suggesting that we’d all be better off without fats.
The earliest advocacy for fat-free dieting was actually rooted in sound medical reasoning, and isolated to cases where it might have proven to be legitimately beneficial. In 1929, renowned baby expert, author and reporter Myrtle Meyer Eldred explained in the Des Moines Register how some children find all dietary fats problematic, and how fat-free substitutes might help to alleviate some of that fat-spawned irritation. “Buttermilk made from churned sour milk is entirely fat free, and for those children who find fat in any form irritating, it is a more successful food than skimmed milk, which cannot be made entirely free of fat,” she wrote.
Similarly, in February 1931, the York Dispatch published a column by Dr. Logan Clendening in which a fat-free diet was advised for combating a very different medical malady — inflammation of the gallbladder. “Gallbladder inflammation of the mild catarrhal form is usually amenable to medical care,” Clendening explained. “The arrangement of the diet is based on known facts of physiology — that bile is used in the digestion of fat. A fat-free diet is therefore indicated.”
However, even in this era, less medically sound anti-fat sentiments were brewing, with serious consequences. Dr. Philip Lovell published a column in the Los Angeles Times in July 1933 about a woman who eschewed fats permanently at the advice of her doctor in order to lose 40 to 45 pounds. “She reduced weight wonderfully,” wrote Lovell. “She kept up her strength, although she suffered from an occasional headache. In less than two months, she lost 40 pounds. All would have been sweet and rosy. It would have been a marvelous diet were it not for the fact that she died at the close of her fat-free diet. I think the doctor called it a heart block. I would call it a crazy fat-free diet — a terrible price to pay for ignorance.”
Basically, she hindered all of the essential bodily functions that are only optimized through the ingestion of dietary fats. The production of key hormones and the regulation of cellular function both mandate the presence of fats, not to mention that the ingested forms of certain vitamins — A, D, E and K — are only capable of being properly administered to the body after being absorbed by dietary fat. Or more simply put, zero fat consumption is far from a good thing.