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Doctors have always realized that being overweight was bad for you. This comes about from simple observation. People who are overweight run into a multitude of health problems, from simple joint problems to heart disease and cancer. In recent decades the obesity rate has been exploding. By the year 2000, researchers in the United States were already concerned with increasing obesity rates. By that time, 30% of adults and 14% of children under the age of 18 were considered obese. By 2015, 40% of adults and nearly 19% of children were suffering from obesity. Whats going on?

Many factors have impacted the rise of obesity. We can start with the obvious after 1950 Americans (and gradually other westerners) had increasing access to fast food, processed food, and junk food. While people either had to eat at home on a budget or at a sit-down restaurant prior to the second world war, by the end of the 1950s the country was full of fast in-an-out hamburger joints that let people get instant access to a meal. And the contents of the food werent the best in addition to a saturated fat-laden burger on a white bread bun, most would top it off with a side of deep-fried French fries loaded with salt. To wash it down, patrons would drink sugar-laden soda pop.

The grocery store evolved too, as food companies discovered ways to package carb-laden snacks that were high in salt for people to take home and eat while they sat in front of a television. They also began using artificially produced trans-fats in the snacks, since trans-fats were shelf stable and cheap. What food companies didnt know at the time was trans-fats were a major danger to heart health, as well see later.

Soda and other sugary products also filled the grocery shelves. The impact on obesity was gradual, as people were still relatively more physically active at the time. However, on average physical activity declined despite various health crazes that filled the passing decades. More and more people found themselves following a sedentary lifestyle, watching television and then playing video games.

Doctors then got led astray by early research into nutrition. A researcher named Ancel Keyes discovered that there was a correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease. The medical community jumped on this news, and since saturated fat consumption increases your cholesterol, they began promoting low-fat high-carb diets. By the 1980s it was received wisdom that a low-fat diet was the key to health. Even though half of the heart attacks occur in people with total cholesterol numbers below 200, doctors latched onto the idea that keeping your cholesterol below 200 was some kind of magic bullet that would prevent heart disease.

People actually listened to this advice, and as the decades wore on more carbs and less fat was consumed. Eggs were demonized on a Time magazine cover, and people reached for their super low-fat special K cereal which they ate with skim milk before heading off to aerobics. At the time, it was believed that foods that were high in cholesterol like egg yolks caused heart disease. Later it was found that in fact, dietary cholesterol has very little impact on your blood levels of cholesterol. Basically, your body makes cholesterol. When you eat it, your body makes less cholesterol. So eating an egg yolk has little impact.

Despite all of this, the health outcomes were not better. Diabetes rates have been increasing despite all the low-fat advice. Heart disease remains the number one killer, and any improvements through the years have been through new drugs (statins) and improved medical treatment, not via better nutrition. As we entered the 21 st century, Americans kept getting fatter.

Over the past decade, people have been sounding alarm bells. Gary Taubes, who is actually an engineer turned nutrition expert, wrote a classic book called Why we get fat . This book laid out the process of digestion of sugar for the general public and explained why fat wasnt really the problem. As well discuss later, a blood fat called triglycerides is a major problem with heart disease, and it turns out that triglycerides although they are fat actually come from sugar. Taubes and others revealed that cutting out fat from our diets has been the root of many of the health problems were now seeing.