You’d better go beyond the headlines on news stories about a huge federal study about low-fat diets. One said they “may not be a panacea.” Another: “Does Not Cut Health Risks.” Still another: “Alone of Little Benefit in Preventing Ills.”

The main thrust of the study was that women who spent eight years on a low-fat diet produced no significant protection against cancer, heart disease and stroke. So the finding seems to have exploded the popular belief that a low-fat diet can reduce these risks. Rockefeller University’s Dr. Jules Hirsch was quoted as saying that the results “should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy.”

That negative finding was termed important, even “revolutionary,” by some authorities. One of the principal investigators, Dr. Barbara V. Howard, an epidemiologist at MedStar Research Institute, said people should realize that diet alone was not enough to stay healthy.

An additional finding was that the low fat diet didn’t reduce weight.

So what should one do? The best advice for now seems to be to follow federal guidelines for healthy eating, quit or avoid smoking and get regular exercise.

An accompanying editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that the study did not consider dietary measures that might have reduced cardiovascular disease, such as reducing salt intake and including more potassium and polyunsaturated fats.

Since the study began in 1993, dietitians have stressed the effects of different types of fats in the diet. The so-called Mediterranean diet is low in saturated fats like butter and the fat in red meats but high in healthful oils like olive oil. The women who took part in the federal study weren’t told to differentiate between “good” and the “bad” fats.

Nor were they limited in the quantities of the foods they ate. That was before the current advice to eat a piece of meat or fish no larger than a pack of cards and a helping of fruit or vegetables at least as big as a tennis ball.

Surprisingly, the study seemed to permit the women to include French fries as well as oil-packed sardines in their limited intake of fats and oils. It’s fries and chips and sodas, along with too much time before video screens that may be responsible for the current

epidemic of overweight and obesity.