New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced a plan to forbid the sale within the city of sugar-sweetened drinks larger than 16 ounces. The limit, which excludes juice-based, artificially-sweetened, and alcoholic drinks, as well as drinks sold at convenience or grocery stores, is his latest contribution to the effort to combat obesity and associated chronic diseases. Fines of $200 may be instituted as soon as March 2013.

Critics maintain that this approach will not decrease obesity because nothing will prevent those who desire from simply stopping at a local convenience store to purchase the drink of their choice before proceeding to their destination. 

These people miss the point. Mayor Bloomberg is not saying you can’t drink as much soda as you want. He’s saying it can’t be your default setting when you make a stop for a fast food meal. He’s saying you can’t buy it all in a single cup.

This reminds me of the time my two young sons threatened to eat white bread at school. I listened solemnly, and replied that they could still eat anything they wanted anywhere they wanted, like at school or a friend’s house. I was not saying they could no longer eat white bread. I was saying was that they could count on the fact that the available options in our home would consist of nutritious, whole foods. Of course my new plan would simultaneously decrease opportunities for choosing empty calories. 

I have heard people say that Mayor Bloomberg’s policy interferes with their freedom to indulge personal appetites (that will significantly increase their risk of becoming sick and/or handicapped). So many years later, I still remember the sign that hung on the front wall of my ninth grade Civics class: “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Are buckets of soda the only cause of obesity?  Of course not. Insufficient activity, giant bagels, overwhelming stress, chronic exhaustion, gargantuan servings of chips and fries in place of fruits and vegetables, and triple-sized burgers all contribute their fair share, not to mention smoking and trans fats.

The obesity epidemic is no longer just an epidemic, but rather a catastrophe. Either we invest in prevention or we pay the consequences. One issue at a time. All roads lead to Medicare, and we will fund the consequences. We’re all in this together. 

Today I’m talking about how words are employed with regard to fat, because the term “healthy fats” annoys me.

Fats are one of three (or four) macronutrients: protein, fat, and fiber (plus water).  Some folks call those three categories protein, fat, and carbohydrate, but that makes it permissible to consider stripped (refined carbohydrate) a macronutrient and that is not the case.  Stripped carbohydrates aren’t food; they’re manufactured calories, and manufactured calories aren’t food.

If, on the other hand, we call that class of macronutrient “fiber,” then you know I’m talking about the carbohydrate that comes up out of the ground and is always, always rich in fiber.  Remember that, with the exception of milk and honey, carbohydrate doesn’t exist in nature without the fiber.  So whenever you come across carbohydrate without fiber attached, we humans probably made it that way.

Well then, what’s wrong with the term “healthy fats?”  Well, we don’t use the adjective “healthy” in front of protein or carbohydrates.  We assume that when you mention them in a blog about good health that you’re talking about the healthy kind.  Yes there are unhealthy carbs, loads of them in fact, yet we don’t feel the need to keep reminding ourselves.  So why do people persist in distinguishing fats as “healthy?”

A couple of reasons, I think. The main one is that we spent the last few decades being trained (by the advertising industry, under direction from the manufactured-calorie industry), to consider fats unhealthy.  We have heard, over and over, that if you eat fat you’ll get fat.  We internalized this message so successfully that we began to wrinkle our noses and stick out our tongues when we said the word “fat.”  Not funny. It turned out that the message was wrong.  We looked around and noticed that the less fat people ate, and the more refined carbohydrate they were taught to substitute, the more overweight they became.  Yes, it took a couple of decades to realize, but it’s no longer impossible to ignore.  We have an enormous weight problem in this country and it’s not because of fat.

We are, finally, coming to understand that fat is good for us, and we’ve identified a few kinds of fat that seem to be particularly good for us, such as olives, avocadoes, nuts, peanuts, and deep-sea fish like tuna or salmon.  In order to distinguish these from what we consider the gross, disgusting, fat-causing types of fat, we started to call these fats “healthy” fats, as if the fats themselves are healthy.  But they’re not.  They’re just chemical compounds that break down into fatty acids of a certain configuration that happen to serve one or another beneficial purposes once we consume them.

These are fats that nourish us, or that provide us with beneficial nutrients.  So from here on in, I’m going to call them nourishing fats, or nutritious fats.  There’s no reason for me to call them healthy; if you read about them on my blog, you already know how I feel about them. Do we now know everything we need to know, everything we’re ever going to need to know, about nutrition?  Definitely not.  But I do believe that there are some important things about which we can all agree.  And one of them is that nutritious fats play an important role in our diets.