Back in the 90s, just about all at once, everyone decided fat was terrible for you. So an industry sprung up — lead by a company called Snackwells — that replaced all the fat in your cookies and baked goods with mountains of delicious fat-free sugar.
Grocery store isles were stacked with green boxes of Snackwells. Only 50 calories per cookie pack, and zero grams of fat. Guiltless crackers. Brownies without the downside. Eat all you want!
And we all ate! Cause fat is bad! Zero fat is good! Pop ’em in your mouth! Pop another one before you finish the other one! I ate a shitton of these things — especially the devil’s food cake ones. Remember those?
But then something strange happened… We all got fatter eating low-fat foods. We’d never been fatter, never unhealthier. We were sold a solution, but we bought a problem.
We gave up something, replaced it with something else, and eventually looked back and realized we ended up far worse off than we started. We’re still recovering from that epidemic 20 years later.
Turns out fat isn’t so bad. What’s really bad in nearly every situation, however, is sugar. Horribly bad. It leads to lots and lots of bad. As we’ve gotten smarter, we’ve begun to link some of the worst forms of disease to sugar.
This reminds me of a trend happening today. It’s not about food. Any guesses?
