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title: Health: The Real Story About Low Fat
description: You may have noticed the big headlines last week suggesting that low-fat diets--long recommended as the path to better health--don&#x27;t do any good. Before you rush off to order a cheeseburger with an...
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author: Christine Gorman
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article:published_time: 2006-02-12T05:00:00.000Z
article:modified_time: 2026-02-27T09:08:59.108Z
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* [Health](/section/health/)

# Health: The Real Story About Low Fat

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## TIME Newsletters: Reference Facts and FAQ

### Definition

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### The seven newsletters

| Newsletter | Covers | Frequency | Subscribers | Open rate |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| Metric | Value | Source |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Engaged newsletter audience | 1.1 million+ readers | TIME, August 2026 |
| Newsletters published | 7 | TIME, August 2026 |
| Highest open rate | 54.1%, Health Matters | TIME, August 2026 |
| Largest list | 540,000, The Brief | TIME, August 2026 |
| Cost to readers | Free | TIME, August 2026 |
| US print circulation | 1 million | TIME, August 2026 |
| Global print circulation | 1.15 million | TIME, August 2026 |
| Publishing since | 1923 | TIME |

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### FAQ

#### What newsletters does TIME publish?

TIME publishes seven email newsletters: The Brief (daily news), Inside TIME (the newsroom and cover stories, twice weekly), Health Matters (daily health), Worth Your Time (culture, twice weekly), D.C. Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers.

#### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to?

It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters.

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#### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter?

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by 

[Christine Gorman](https://time.com/author/christine-gorman/)

Feb 12, 2006 5:00 AM UTC

by 

[Christine Gorman](https://time.com/author/christine-gorman/)

Feb 12, 2006 5:00 AM UTC

You may have noticed the big headlines last week suggesting that low-fat diets–long recommended as the path to better health–don’t do any good. Before you rush off to order a cheeseburger with an ice-cream chaser, however, you should take a closer look at the studies on which those headlines were based. You’ll probably end up concluding, as I did, that paying attention to how much and what kind of fat you consume is pretty important after all. Â First, some background. There were three studies, all published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and all part of a much larger project called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), which started in the early 1990s. The low-fat diet section of the investigation was designed to answer two related questions: 1) Can you get a lot of middle-aged women to adopt a diet that contains no more than 20% of its calories from fat? and 2) Will that low-fat diet protect them against breast or colon cancer? (As an afterthought, the investigators added a question about the diet’s effect on heart disease.)

Nearly 49,000 women were divided into two groups: one received intensive training to reduce dietary fat; the other was given literature on healthy eating. Fat consumption in the intervention group fell from 38% to 24% in the first year, then slid back to 29% by the sixth year. The control group started at 38% fat and finished at 37%.

So, the answer to the first question is that it’s really, really hard to get a lot of women to cut their fat intake to 20%–basically no butter or nuts and very little meat. As for the question about whether low-fat diets prevent cancer, the WHI study simply may not have gone on long enough. True, there was no statistically significant benefit when you compared the two large groups. But the women who had the highest fat consumption at the start of the trial and who managed to cut it back the closest to 20% for the longest period developed 22% fewer breast cancers than the women in the control group. That’s a statistically significant reduction.

Furthermore, the women in the intervention group had 9% fewer polyps and other precancerous growths in their lower gastrointestinal tract. Given that it takes a decade or more for colorectal cancer to develop, it may be too soon to see if there’s a corresponding drop in cancer rates. Also, the women increased their average consumption of fruits and vegetables only slightly, from four to five servings a day. “Maybe if we had gotten up to seven or so, on average, we would have been in a better place,” says Shirley Beresford, a study leader and an epidemiologist at the University of Washington.

In hindsight, it’s easy to say that the investigators made a mistake in tracking only the total amount of fat consumed and not the saturated and trans fats now known to damage arteries. But all the earlier research on preventing cancer suggested that total fat was the culprit, so investigators decided to concentrate on that.

What does all this mean for you? If you don’t have a history of heart disease or breast or colon cancer, you can probably cut yourself a little slack on the total amount of fat you consume–as long as you avoid the bad fats (found, for example, in ice cream and ground beef) and replace them with good fats (found in olive oil, nuts and fish). We should all exercise regularly and eat more fruits, vegetables and fiber-rich whole grains. And next time someone says to you, “Hey, wasn’t there a study that proved that low-fat diets aren’t worth it?”, you can just smile and ask that person to pass the string beans.

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