Fat makes comeback after 3 lean decades

"For years in the test kitchens of Cooking Light magazine, virtually every recipe started with low-fat cooking spray. If a little more fat was needed, readers were advised to use margarine.

But no more. The nation's largest-circulation food and fitness magazine still preaches the value of lower fat cooking, but now recipes call for healthy amounts of canola oil, olive oil and -- egads -- even butter.

"We now know the kind of fat is more important than the quantity," said food editor Jill Melton. "We have loosened, and so have our readers."

All over the country, and especially in the food-sophisticated Bay Area, fat, in all its glorious, slick incarnations, is coming back. After three lean decades, chefs, home cooks and even the nutritionists who persuaded us to board the low-fat bus in the first place are rejecting the notion that fat is what makes us fat.

"We're beginning a new kind of balance," said Clark Wolf, a food and restaurant consultant in San Francisco and New York who works with New York University's Department of Nutrition and Food Studies. "In the '80s, we really had food phobias. People were afraid of cheese and butter and eggs."

Full article: sfgate.com