If you were to ask any ordinary American the question “Are fatty foods bad for your health?” that person would probably confidently reply, “Yes! They are.” Then if you were to ask, “Why do you believe this?” the most honest answer that they can give you is “Umm…because everyone says so.” For nearly all Americans, when we think of fatty foods somehow our minds directly link this to as being harmful to our health and body. But why do we think these high-fat foods are so detrimental to our health? For the majority of us, we have no liable knowledge about food science nor did we do any kind of research of how fatty foods affect our health. Yet we still have that strong belief that fat is bad.

This can be explained by what is called the informational cascade. An informational cascade occurs when people use other people’s judgments to reconsider on their own judgment. But sometimes because a majority of people chose one way, the person would ignore their own judgment and follow the crowd. This is explained in the article, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1, where it discusses about how this “fat is bad” concept is just one gargantuan informational cascade.

The first person to start the “fat is bad” cascade was a prominent diet researcher named Ancel Keys. In the 1950’s, Ancel Keys was convinced that Americans were getting more heart disease because they were eating more fats that their ancestors. However this theory was flawed in the fact that the diet of our ancestors was never confirmed to have less fat content. In fact, studies showed that they actually had similar or even higher fat content. To further support his theory, Keys compared the heart disease rate to the diets of six different countries. Although he did find the correlation of more fatty diet the more heart disease, critics argue that if all the countries of the world were analyzed, the results would have been different. Even with these shortcomings in Keys’ Theory, the American Heart Association assumed Keys was right and concluded that Dr. Keys’ findings were “the best scientific evidence of the time”.

Soon enough, nearly all the other doctors, who were uncertain themselves, agreed with this consensus. Furthermore, whoever questioned or challenged this theory were risking their reputation and therefore had no choice but to agree. Consequently the fat-is-bad became common knowledge to all Americans.

Although it may seem like fat-is-bad is now common sense to us, we may have just been following a false theory just because everyone else is following it. So now all we can do is follow the herd and wait for someone with strong evidence and a stronger personal judgment to either take down this giant cascade or may as well further strengthen it. So next time you’re about to dig into that fatty burger, steak or chicken thigh, enjoy it, cause there is still a good chance that it actually might be good for you.