Doesn't it seem like the "blame game" is rampant in our country; like we want to point the finger at anything that moves whenever something goes wrong? Suit-happy lawyers, at the ready, encourage us to vindicate our misfortune and bad decisions through the courts. Unfortunately, personal responsibility is often lost along the way.  Let's say you had just purchased coffee from a drive thru, and the cup read, "Be careful, this coffee is hot." Then you lurched off in your car because you belong in the eye-foot clutch coordination Special Olympics, spilled coffee in your lap and had to get skin grafts to fix the 3^rd degree burns on your leg. Do you sue someone for that? Someone thought so.  We hear about such excessive law suits all the time. Why? It's not only because lawyers can be the cultural equivalent of filter feeders, eagerly sifting through all that drifts to the bottom, hoping to generate a pearl.

    The problem's deeper than that, resting inside our most basic beliefs, and has the following logic.  If something goes wrong, then an offending cause must lurk behind it. Find the cause and remove the problem so it will go away. Like a splinter.  In this way of thinking, there are no "accidents", and blame can always be deferred to someone else.  Let's say someone takes a long look in a full-length mirror. A grimace unconsciously grips their face as they mutter, "now there's a problem." The splinter notion says, find the culprit at the most elemental level. Find the evil that buttressed the bulges, caked on the cellulite saddlebags, and forced the purchase of yet larger pants. Eliminate that cause and the Mirror Mirror on the wall becomes a sight friendlier next time.  If there is a culprit, what would it be? Logically, begin from the top. Nourishment. It's true that eliminating nourishment melts weight problems right away. Unfortunately, you get sick and die. Great diet, but the definition of success means that you can't stay on it.  The offender, then, must be one step down. What is nourishment made of? Foods.

Ah ha! Foods are the problem - now we are getting somewhere.

But which foods? For that we must take our reductive principles where none have gone before. Foods are composed of molecules. Let's suppose that one of them is the dreaded molecular splinter, diabolically causing all our blobs, bumples, and bulges. It must be either carbohydrates, proteins, or fats.  FATS? Ah ha! What if the fat you eat becomes fat you wear? Cut the fat, and you cut the fat! Eliminate foods with fat in them and you will solve all your problems. The fat is the great nutritional evil. Now we're really getting somewhere.

(Wait. 80% of the dry weight of your brain is fat. Don't you need that?) SSHH!

(75% of your blood cholesterol is made by your own liver. If you decrease it, your liver just makes more.) QUIET!

(Doesn't this mean replacing real foods like eggs, nuts, and butter with some synthesized food product extruded from an industrial manufacturing plant?). I'm warning you!

(What if our problems come from how we eat, not just what we eat?). That's it, you, I've had it. Out of the pool!

In the early 1990's, doctors found that people with high blood pressure who pulled out the splinter (i.e., eliminated the fats) turned up at hospitals with stroke. It turns out your brain does need fat after all. Moreover, our flirtation with high carbohydrate diets have not lessened cholesterol problems, particularly those resulting from the condition known as hypertrygliceredemia.

It's becoming clear only now that cholesterol from natural foods like eggs is not as bad as everyone had feared. By contrast, industrial food products that replace natural products with inventions like hydrogenated oils, significantly elevate the risk of heart attacks. They also brim with the additive sweeteners that leave us tired and hungry - so, moving about less, eating more - a bad combination.  Food is certainly linked to health and weight problems. And fat is obviously in food. But if food is not the culprit, and it's not the fat itself, then what is causing our problems?   Here is one very obvious example. Doctors give out pills because that's what they do. The instructions are, "this will help, take one per day." Suppose someone took one per day and felt much better. Then, they began thinking that, if one per day is good, imagine how great ten per day will be! But 10 of the very same pills suddenly changes a cure into a poison.

It's not about the pills. The context matters. Now back to food. Butter is a wonderful health food - in small doses. Its Vitamins A, E, and selenium are all great for you. But eat a tub of it, and you'll become gigantic and drop dead from a heart attack. Heart attacks from eating buckets of butter are not about the butter - just as death or disease from too many of your doctor's pills is not about the medication.  If this is true, then food is not the problem at all. Over-consumption is the problem.  Settling on our very Puritan strategy of finding a dietary evil to purge from out diets unfortunately justifies our gobbling down as much fat free (or carb free) stuff as we can pack in at the $4.95 buffet. The Puritan Splinter point of view lets us gorge because the focus is outside our own habits. Restraint at the fork is a harder pill to swallow than for someone to tell you that it's not your fault. It's that molecule in the diet that did it to you.  

    The point is that how you eat matters and food itself is agnostic. It becomes good or bad depending on your behavior - good at a small dose, bad at a larger dose. If you adopt this point of view, a new set of available food choices emerges.  Eggs - the most nutrient-dense food around - become very, very good for you. The cocoa in chocolate - praise the Lord - is a dramatically good health food. Fresh bread, pasta, and even cheese are all fine.  What must be given up, however, is not some culpable molecule from hell, but the tendency to graze throughout the day with a shovel. Inhaling gigantic portions on the plate in 7.42 minutes flat produces nothing but added sales from the "More To Love" section of the department store.  When pondering the enormous Pandora's box of dietary regimes out there, a variety of molecular evils are possible, ranging from fats to carbohydrates to some specific combined calculus of these. But no natural food coming from the Earth is bad for you or good for you. It becomes one or the other depending on your actions at the plate, at the fork.

 
Dr. Clower is the award-winning author of  The Fat Fallacy, The French Don't Diet, and Founder of The PATH  Wellness Programs