The real story about low fat.

You may have noticed the big headlines last week suggesting that low-fat diets--long recommended as the path to better health--don't do any good. Before you rush off to order a cheeseburger with an ice-cream chaser, however, you should take a closer look at the studies on which those headlines were based. You'll probably end up concluding, as I did, that paying attention to how much and what kind of fat you consume is pretty important after all. Â First, some background. There were three studies, all published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and all part of a much larger project called the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), which started in the early 1990s. The low-fat diet section of the investigation was designed to answer two related questions: 1) Can you get a lot of middle-aged women to adopt a diet that contains no more than 20% of its calories from fat? and 2) Will that low-fat diet protect them against breast or colon cancer? (As an afterthought, the investigators added a question about the diet's effect on heart disease.)