The idea that dietary carbohydrate, sugars and starches, have some unique power to make people fat is pretty old. It would be hard to identify the first farmer who fattened animals for market by feeding them grain.
The mechanism: The anabolic effects of the hormone insulin, stimulated primarily by the sugar glucose, was a well established physiologic phenomenon before the first low carbohydrate revolution. Although it has been around for a long time, carbohydrate restriction only became
revolutionary with the ascendancy of a kind of low-fat nutritional-medical monarchy with powerful influence.
Gary Taubes’book“Good Calories, Bad Calories”documented the political ascendancy of the low-fat paradigm and the establishment of something like the Court of Low-Fat. Taubes’book was the most compelling presentation of how nutritional science had been taken over by this group of lipophobes. Numerous re-tellings have followed. The recent "Big Fat
Surprise" is of comparable literary quality to “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and is more explicit in its condemnation of the players. Ultimately, with control over even the NIH, the low-fat mafia could now resist all scientific argument and dismiss all of the experimental failures of low-fat to give us anything at all. The ascendancy of low-fat was, and still is, coupled with a special hatred for low-carbohydrate diets and especially for its main exponent, Dr. Atkins, even after his death.
Of the tests of the low-fat idea that failed, nothing was more embarrassing than the Women’s health initiative (WHI) which reported in 2006: “Over a mean of 8.1 years, a dietary
intervention that reduced total fat intake and increased intakes of vegetables, fruits, and grains did not significantly reduce the risk of CHD, stroke, or CVD in postmenopausal women.....”
The WHI women weren’t getting any better and the population at large, doing its best to adhere to low-fat advise,was getting fatter and more diabetic in this period. Refusal to see the WHI for what it was, represented a clear statement that the lipophobes, starting at the top of the NIH, were going to stonewall any effort to change.