Is it time to go retro and embrace all that was big back in the 1980s? To start watching VHS tapes of "Hill Street Blues," "Cheers," and "The Cosby Show" and listening to cassette tapes of Michael Jackson, Glo

For women to wear big hair and to dress for workouts like Jennifer Beals in "Flashdance." For men to shave in a way that makes if look as if they haven't and dress for work like Don Johnson in "Miami Vice."Uh, probably not. While the world will continue to experience good times and bad times, we should never again be subjected to something called Hammer Time.But based on research funded by the European Commission and published by Clinical Nutrition, at least one idea fully embraced back in the 1980s should be brought back: the belief that eating fat makes you fat.Now I've never stopped being old school about this because of what I learned way back when. Not only is fat more than twice as calorically dense as protein or carbohydrates, but it also gets stored in the body as fat far more efficiently than protein or complex carbs.The real reason why the fat-free craze that began in the 80s backfired and made Americans fatter is simplesimple carbs, that is.Simple carbs, primarily processed sugar and enriched flour, get stored as body fat nearly as efficiently as dietary fat, but are worse in this sense: they spike blood sugar levels.Increased blood sugar levels trigger an excessive release of insulin, which does a number of bad things, including making you hungry even though you just consumed calories as recently as 60 minutes ago.During the fat-free craze that began in the 80s, food producers added simple carbs to virtually all of their new fat-free creations. They knew and still know that the mainstream consumer will only buy processed food marketed as "healthy" food if it also tastes good.Since fat adds taste to foods and job number one for food producers is to produce a profit, they needed to replace the missing "taste" in fat-free foods with something.A simple and inexpensive solution was to add processed sugars. Talk about overkill: some of the fat-free foods received so much added "taste" that they contained more total calories per serving than the full-fat version.But that was then.Now we also know something besides the fact that added sugars have added weight to the typical American. We have the results of the Healthy Lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescence study, better known as HELENA, which clearly show the negative effects of excessive fat ingestion.First, researchers confirmed what the bodybuilding world knew by the 1980s: that regardless of total calories consumed, eating fat makes you fat. What the HELENA research also clearly showed is that a high-fat diet leads to an accumulation of fat in the abdomen.To determine this, HELENA researchers used dual x-ray asorptiometry on 224 adolescents and then assessed their diets and amount of physical activity.Second, they determined that excessive fat ingestion is a problem that even the old cure-all, exercise, can't correct. Idoia Labayen, Ph.D. and the lead researcher of the study, said, "Until now it was thought that even with an unbalanced diet, you somehow compensated for it if you got plenty of exercise. In this study we have shown that this is not the case."This finding is particularly troublesome since other studies have found unhealthy amounts of abdominal fat to be a harbinger for many of the diseases now troubling the U.S. and much of the world.Your chance of developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, other heart problems, and diabetes, for example, all increase as abdominal fat increases.This finding is also particularly pertinent since it is this time of year when you may be increasing workout time and eating a little bit better or a little bit less. Memorial Day is about seven weeks away, and even if you're not headed to the beach or the pool, you're definitely going to be dressed in less.What the HELENA study suggests is that the fat you hope to shed between now and then isn't going anywhere unless you pay particular to the amount of fat you put on your plate.Yes, you may argue, for instance, that it's "healthy" to use olive oil liberally as part of the Mediterranean diet, but don't forget that that word is an all-encompassing term. Using monounsaturated fats is "heart healthy," those fats still contain more than double the calories contained in equal amounts of protein and carbohydrate and an excess of them can cause weight gain.In short, increasing your exercise time and indiscriminately cutting back on calories will create weight loss between now and Memorial Day, but if you want to notice a visual difference between now and thenand especially in the abdomenyou need to make a concerted effort to reduce fat ingestion.And all but a very little fat is essential. In fact, you can get the amount you need by eating lean meats, leafy greens, whole grains, legumes, and beanswithout the use of butter, margarine, or cooking oil.