Comment by maxlybbert

About a year ago, I started looking into current nutritional advice. One thing that stood out was that the average American used to get 40% of their calories from fat and 1/6 of Americans were obese. The government recommended reducing fat to less than 30% of overall calories, and, amazingly, Americans actually followed the recommendation. We now get about 30% of our calories from fat, and 1/3 of us are obese.

That doesn’t say much about what kind of fat we’re eating (e.g., if it’s oil), but the advice to reduce calories from fat was based on them being empty calories. It appears that they also help people feel full longer.

Personally, when I eat a salad for lunch, it doesn’t bother me that literally 85% of the calories come from fat (15 calories for the lettuce, 90 calories for the salad dressing). Even if I have low-fat salad dressing (30 calories), I’m getting 66% of my calories from fat.

Then again , maybe I’m reading the data wrong: it’s possible to reduce the percentage of calories coming from fat by eating the same amount of fat, and more food overall. Maybe Americans just did that.