Fat vs. Sugar: Rethinking the Root Cause of Obesity

Fat is no longer the culprit, as sugar takes center stage

In 1915, a traveling cheese salesman faced two irreconcilable problems: his product took a year and a half to cure and then spoiled within days. He was Kraft. He found a way to sterilize it without ruining the flavor and produce it in days instead of months. This resulted in more cheese, cheaper and longer-lasting. This episode, which seems like a textbook anecdote, summarizes the core of the peine debate: processed food is more abundant and cheap than fresh food because fresh food spoils. And on this basis, it is decided whether fat is the cause of obesity or just the current scapegoat.

Why does processed food dominate fresh food in supermarkets?

Because it lasts months without refrigeration and costs a fraction of keeping a perishable product fresh. This is the starting point of the most critical argument: if it were banned, the prognosis would be triple — less food available, more expensive, and an obligation to consume it immediately. The industry, moreover, learned to manage the shelf. Since the sixties, when the buyer started shunning fat, light versions served to return to the shelf he avoided; once there, the usual product ended up falling. The highlighted result: fat consumption has not stopped growing and has done so in parallel with obesity, despite some discourse repeating that we eat less fat.

Do fat and sugar trigger cravings equally? No, and the difference matters

The thesis opening the issue is that fat has no brake and sugar does. Eating fat stimulates a nerve called the trigeminal and lights up the nucleus accumbens, the brain circuit of pleasure and addiction; eating sugar activates tongue receptors and causes the same lighting. Up to that point, a technical tie. The asymmetry appears at the limit: the palate tolerates sweetness only up to a certain point — past the threshold, the food is unpleasant — but does not put a ceiling on fat. Hence, almost everything we call sweet is, in reality, fat with sugar. Ice cream, pastries, chocolate: fat is the vehicle and sugar, the disguise. And those who think they have given up sugar have usually given up only fat with sugar.

Wheat from the last 50 years and the rise of intolerances

We have been eating flours for 10,000 years, a current holds, and only in the last five decades has wheat suffered brutal manipulation; hence, the drip of gluten intolerances. The rebuttal comes thundering: 99.9% of people eat bread and do not feel bad, so something is wrong with the broad-brush diagnosis. In between, an uncomfortable nuance slips in: there is no flour that is not processed, because to consume cereals, you must refine them. The debate, then, shifts from cereal yes or no to how industrial the processed product is. In the same conversation, pasteurization emerges: untreated cheese retains more nuances, but can also carry bacteria that heat eliminates.

Doctors, 1,500-calorie diets, and a cracking paradigm

The sharpest criticism points to official medicine. A typical consultation is described: photocopied prescription of 1,500 calories, little nutritional training, and when the scale does not go down, the blame goes to the patient. Some go further and maintain that many professionals prescribe what comes down from above — statins from 200 cholesterol included — without real margin to disagree. In response to this reading, another argument is offered: evidence on saturated and polyunsaturated fats sums hundreds of thousands of studies, not a hunch. And, however, cases of young doctors advising the opposite are already circulating, eggs with bacon included. The generational relay is far from closed.

Testimonials: blood tests, glucose, and kilos of nuts

Here the issue ceases to be theoretical. A person with type 1 diabetes for almost 20 years reports that they trinc the official guideline — bread and portions of carbohydrates as a supplement — and carried a glycated hemoglobin of 8 or more; by changing approach, markers improved. Another has gone five years without processed foods, without bread or pasta, and has not had another sick leave. And there is who eats eggs daily with the lowest cholesterol of their life. At the other end of the counter, the puzzling detail: two kilos of nut butter in ten days and not a gram more on the scale.

The most uncomfortable fact is not any of those tests, but that the same food changes profile depending on how it is cooked. Grilled bacon provides 28 fat and 22 protein; fried, it jumps to 64 fat and 14 protein. Same slice, two distinct foods. With this picture on the table, to declare that fat is the cause of obesity sounds, at the very least, hasty.