How is it that fat — and especially lard — has come to be seen as such a good thing all of a sudden? Just this last weekend I was in the checkout line at my local Whole Foods. There I noticed a "health food" magazine cover that featured a piece of bread slathered with what appeared to be lard. The headline exclaimed something to the effect that fat is good for you! The drill-down copy then proceeded to bullet out all the ways in which fat aids the metabolism. I'm not going to disagree with any of it, though I get whiplash reading the popular food press these days.

So what happened? How did fat — especially pig fat — become a the de-facto health food item it's become the past couple of years? Sure, celebrity chefs like to credit themselves with changing the popular perception of fat. Tom Colicchio got famous for serving braised, fresh pork belly at Gramercy Tavern five years ago, and Mario Batali has always enjoyed his bits of guanciale and lardo. Yet such indulgences would never have captured the public imagination were tectonic shifts not already occurring in the realm of food and health.

What were those shifts? One of them was of course the public move away from trans fats, which began to occur almost a decade ago and needs no further examination here. The other was the failure of the Women's Health Initiative. If you don't know what the Women's Health Initiative was, suffice to say it was no ordinary medical study. Not a normal university sampling of a hundred or so participants, the kind that are churned out by the thousands each year. No, the Women's Health initiative was designed to be the grandaddy (I guess technically grandmommy) of all fat studies. Conducted by the US government at a cost of $415 million, it was a fifteen year study of some 50,000 women — the biggest, longest of its kind ever undertaken. One of the primary objectives of the study, to demonstrate definitively and for all time the connection between fat consumption and diseases like cancer, heart attacks and strokes. For years before the results of the the study were tabulated and published, dietary scolds around the country were licking their collective chops at the prospect of ruining our enjoyment of grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches — forever.

And then, in January of 2006, the results came out. To say that they stunned the dietary and health establishments of the nation is putting it mildly. Doctors, nutritionists and dietitians were left numb, stupefied. For the results of the study showed, and showed clearly, no connection between the intake of fat — any kind of fat — and incidence of disease. Cheers went up at fried chicken stands around the nation.

Of course not everybody was convinced. A variety of health experts and journalists (including the ubiquitous Mr. Michael Pollan) came out against the study, citing its various defects. Had the results gone the other way, however, I'm quite certain none of them would now be scrutinizing the methodology and calling for a do-over. Do I myself completely buy the results of the WHI? I'd be lying if I said yes. I can't quite accept the notion that diet and health aren't linked in that way. However I do firmly believe that diet is but a single aspect of one's overall health, other important factors being things like exercise, stress levels and overall happiness. A little pig fat every once in a while, people are coming to see, has a way of making a person quite, quite happy. And that is a very healthy thing indeed.