The new film by a Boise-based production team examines the guidelines that demonized fatty foods for decades.
BOISE, Idaho The Boise-based production team that's made its mark with breathtaking, Emmy-winning documentaries featuring Idaho's outdoors has turned its cameras inside -- as in what your body does with the food you put into it.
As you may gather from the title, the filmmakers and the experts they feature want you to forget everything you've been told about fat. Turn the "food pyramid" upside-down. Maybe not literally, but close.
About 2 1/2 years ago, the film's producer,.Jennifer Isenhart, decided to take a sugar detox class.
She said that what she learned over those five weeks blew her mind.
The very first day of class, Isenhart said, they told her to not only avoid sugar, but eat more fat!
Isenhart said everything she had learned regarding a "proper diet," and everything we had been taught growing up, she was being told was wrong.
"I went out and started doing my own research on the topic and finding all of this information about how the dietary guidelines were upside down and backwards," she said. "The idea that we should cut back on all fat and instead eat seven to 11 servings of carbohydrates a day - which is what we were told in 1980, the first (federal) dietary guidelines - it actually coincides with the launch of the obesity and type-2 diabetes epidemic in this country."
While "Fat Fiction" raises questions about the guidelines, it does not claim that they were part of some big, deliberate conspiracy.
"I think, at the time, the people that were making these recommendations thought they were doing the right thing," Isenhart said. "All the people we interview in the film agree on that point. People weren't intentionally trying to give bad advice, but they jumped ahead of the science at the time. At the time that we recommended the low-fat diet to the nation, there was no science to prove that it was a healthy way to eat."
One person in the film's trailer calls the decades-old high-carb, low-fat guidelines "genocide."
Isenhart said she has heard from some friends in the medical profession who disagree with the film's premise.
"I just kept going forward, because the physicians that I've interviewed and the patients that I've interviewed are reversing chronic disease: Type-2 diabetes, like, in a matter of weeks, and it's happening over and over again with a low-carb, high-fat diet. Not only are they reversing a chronic disease, but all of their markers improve, so it's kind of hard to argue with that kind of evidence."
One of the arguments against a low-carb, high-fat - or keto - diet has been that there's little evidence of the long-term effects.
"That's one of the frustrations in this whole story -- the counterargument against keto and low-carb is 'well, there's no science,'" Isenhart said. "That was part of the problem ... no scientific studies would be funded if they were low-carb. That was part of the control of the status quo of the dietary guidelines -- funding to look at low-carbohydrate diets, for decades. Now, finally, Silicon Valley money has come in and funded some studies. And we finally just in the last five years are getting clinical trial evidence that low-carb, ketogenic diets reverse type-2 diabetes."
Isenhart said she feels really good about putting out a project that people can learn from and use to improve their health, without gimmicks.
"You don't have to buy anything. It explains how the metabolism in our bodies works, and it explains how you can reverse many chronic diseases by eating real, whole food."
One of the conditions considered "high-risk" in the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak is type-2 diabetes -- the others mentioned by name are asthma and cardiovascular disease.
"Fat Fiction" is available on Amazon Video.
A special premiere showing will stream at 7:30 p.m. Thursday on Fan Force TV, with a live chat and question-and-answer session with the experts from the film.
Read more:
'Fat Fiction' takes a critical look at what we've been taught about nutrition - KTVB.com
