There’s a particular kind of tiredness I hear about constantly, and it usually comes from people who did everything by the book (low-fat spread, the cereal with the heart tick, the fat-free yoghurt, juice with breakfast) for years, feeling somewhat virtuous about it. And who got more tired, not less, heavier round the middle, and eventually a blood test that drifted the wrong way (i.e. their HbA1c creeping up!). If that’s you, here’s the thing I most want you to take on board: this isn’t a story about you failing. It’s a story about being pointed at the wrong thing. And once you’ve seen how deliberately that happened, it’s very hard to keep blaming yourself. The bit that reads like a thriller In the 1950s and 60s, as heart disease climbed, researchers had two credible suspects in the modern diet: saturated fat, and sugar. The evidence genuinely pointed both ways. It was an open question. It didn’t stay open by accident. In 2016, researchers published a historical analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine, built from the sugar industry’s own internal documents, and what those papers show is remarkable. A sugar trade group had worked out as early as the mid-1950s that if the public switched to low-fat diets, sugar consumption would climb by more than a third. So in 1965 it funded a small group of Harvard nutrition scientists to write a review of the diet–heart evidence, chose the studies that went in, set the objective in advance, and saw the drafts. The review, published in a leading medical journal in 1967, was tough on every study implicating sugar and gave fat and cholesterol the favouring role. The industry funding wasn’t disclosed, as the journal didn’t require it at the time. And one of those scientists later became head of nutrition at the US Department of Agriculture, where he helped shape the low-fat dietary guidance that the whole Western world, us included, went on to follow. An accompanying editorial in the same journal made the wider point plainly: industry-funded nutrition science has a long history of nudging conclusions in the funder’s favour. This isn’t a fringe theory from the internet. It’s on the record, in one of medicine’s most respected journals, drawn from the original letters and cheques. I’m careful with this, because it’s easy to over-egg. The industry didn’t single-handedly invent the low-fat era. Plenty of well-meaning scientists believed the fat hypothesis on its own merits. But it helped tip a genuinely open debate at exactly the moment it mattered, and away from the thing that turned out to matter most for a lot of us. And when they finally tested it… If cutting fat really protected hearts, the trials should have shown it. The largest test, the Women’s Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial, nearly 49,000 women given years of intensive support to eat low-fat, versus a group who carried on as usual, followed them for around eight years and found no meaningful reduction in heart disease. And when researchers looked across 18 countries in the PURE study, more than 135,000 people, higher fat intake wasn’t linked to cardiovascular disease at all, while higher carbohydrate intake tracked with worse overall outcomes. Here’s where I tread carefully, because the opposite mistake is just as unhelpful. None of this means saturated fat is a health food, and none of it is a reason to ignore what your GP has told you about your heart or your cholesterol. If you’re on medication for it, you keep taking it, and you keep that conversation going with your doctor. This is population-level evidence about large groups, not personalised advice for you. What it does say, consistently, is that the confident old instruction of “strip out the fat, pile in the carbohydrate, and you’ll be healthier” didn’t hold up. The swap that actually hit you Because in the real world, “eat less fat” was never neutral. Fat carries flavour, so when it came out of the products on the shelves, sugar and refined starch went in to replace it. And what you replace fat with turns out to be the whole game. A large study by Jakobsen and colleagues found that swapping saturated fat for fast-releasing, high-glycaemic carbohydrate didn’t lower heart-attack risk and, if anything, nudged it up; swapping it for low-glycaemic carbohydrate looked more favourable. A review in Current Atherosclerosis Reports put it bluntly: replacing fat with refined, high-glycaemic carbohydrate is unlikely to reduce heart-disease risk and may raise it in people prone to insulin resistance (which is a very large share of us). So the low-fat era did something almost nobody (other than the sugar industry) intended. It moved a generation off fat and onto sugar, and told them, the whole way, that this was the healthier choice. Your body felt every bit of it. Fat and protein are the brakes on your blood sugar; they slow the release of glucose from a meal into your bloodstream. Strip them out and leave mostly refined carbohydrate, and a “healthy” breakfast becomes a spike and a crash, where you’ll feel flat and hungry again by mid-morning, reaching for the next thing. For many people, this happens three times a day, for years. That’s the afternoon slump, the middle that won’t shift, the number creeping up. Not a discipline problem, but a rules problem. What actually helps I’m not about to tell you fat is a superfood and carbs are the enemy. I’m not into promoting new dogmas. But a few gentle shifts that can help include: * Put the fat and protein back. A proper portion of protein and some real fat at each meal changes the shape of your day. A breakfast that keeps your energy steady, rather than one that hands you back to hunger by eleven. * Read past the word “low-fat” on packaged foods. Turn the packet over. If the fat’s gone and sugar’s crept up the ingredients list, it isn’t the health food it’s dressed as. The plain full-fat version with two ingredients is often the quieter, better choice. * Judge food by what it does to you. Your energy at 3pm, your hunger between meals, your sleep - that’s honest feedback, and usually more reliable than the front of the box. If you’ve spent years being careful and still feel let down by your own body, I’d gently suggest the problem was never you. You were pointed at the wrong villain by people who had a reason to point. And that’s a very freeing thing to finally know. If you’d like to spot the pattern in your own days, my free guide Is Your Blood Sugar Working Against You? Ten Signs Most People Completely Miss is the place to start. And if you’d like a proper conversation about your own situation, feel free to book one of my free 30-minute Blood Sugar Audits are open this month. Thank you for being here. See you next week, Frances x Frances Norgate || Qualified Nutrition and Lifestyle Advisor || francesnorgate.com Thanks for reading Nourished & Found! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francesnorgate.substack.com
