Buying Options
Print List Price: | $20.00 |
Kindle Price: | $14.99 Save $5.01 (25%) |
Sold by: | Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc Price set by seller. |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

![The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by [Nina Teicholz]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41VnOgYL4nL._SY346_.jpg)
The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet Kindle Edition
Nina Teicholz (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Price | New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial |
MP3 CD, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $19.46 | — |
Named one of The Economist’s Books of the Year 2014
Named one of The Wall Street Journal’s Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of 2014
Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014
Forbes’s Most Memorable Healthcare Book of 2014
In The Big Fat Surprise, investigative journalist Nina Teicholz reveals the unthinkable: that everything we thought we knew about dietary fat is wrong. She documents how the low-fat nutrition advice of the past sixty years has amounted to a vast uncontrolled experiment on the entire population, with disastrous consequences for our health.
For decades, we have been told that the best possible diet involves cutting back on fat, especially saturated fat, and that if we are not getting healthier or thinner it must be because we are not trying hard enough. But what if the low-fat diet is itself the problem? What if the very foods we’ve been denying ourselves—the creamy cheeses, the sizzling steaks—are themselves the key to reversing the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease?
In this captivating, vibrant, and convincing narrative, based on a nine-year-long investigation, Teicholz shows how the misinformation about saturated fats took hold in the scientific community and the public imagination, and how recent findings have overturned these beliefs. She explains why the Mediterranean Diet is not the healthiest, and how we might be replacing trans fats with something even worse. This startling history demonstrates how nutrition science has gotten it so wrong: how overzealous researchers, through a combination of ego, bias, and premature institutional consensus, have allowed dangerous misrepresentations to become dietary dogma.
With eye-opening scientific rigor, The Big Fat Surprise upends the conventional wisdom about all fats with the groundbreaking claim that more, not less, dietary fat—including saturated fat—is what leads to better health and wellness. Science shows that we have been needlessly avoiding meat, cheese, whole milk, and eggs for decades and that we can now, guilt-free, welcome these delicious foods back into our lives.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateMay 13, 2014
- File size5334 KB
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Solid, well-reported science… Like a bloodhound, Teicholz tracks the process by which a hypothesis morphs into truth without the benefit of supporting data.” (Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review))
"Nina Teicholz reveals the disturbing underpinnings of the profoundly misguided dietary recommendations that have permeated modern society, culminating in our overall health decline. But The Big Fat Surprise is refreshingly empowering. This wonderfully researched text provides the reader with total validation for welcoming healthful fats back to the table, paving the way for weight loss, health and longevity." (David Perlmutter, MD, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs )
"A page-turner story of science gone wrong: what Gary Taubes did in Good Calories, Bad Calories for debunking the connection between fat consumption and obesity, Nina Teicholz now does in Big Fat Surprise for the purported connection between fat and heart disease. Misstep by misstep, blunder by blunder, Ms. Teicholz recounts the statistical cherry-picking, political finagling, and pseudoscientific bullying that brought us to yet another of the biggest mistakes in health and nutrition, the low-fat and low-saturated fat myth for heart health." (William Davis, MD, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Bac )
"At last the whole truth about the luscious foods our bodies really need!" (Christiane Northrup, M.D., ob/gyn physician and author of the New York Times bestseller Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom )
"This meticulously researched book thoroughly dismantles the current dietary dogma that fat--particularly saturated fat--is bad for us. Teicholz brings to life the key personalities in the field and uncovers how nutritional science has gotten it so wrong. There aren't enough superlatives to describe this journalistic tour de force. I read it twice: once for the information and again just for the writing." (Michael R. Eades, M.D., author of the New York Times bestseller Protein Power )
"The Big Fat Surprise delivers on its title, exposing the shocking news that much of what “everybody knows” about a healthy diet is in fact all wrong. This book documents how misunderstanding, misconduct and bad science caused generations to be misled about nutrition. Anyone interested in either food or health will want to read to this book." (Nathan Myhrvold, author of Modernist Cuisine )
“[Teicholz] has a gift for translating complex data into an engaging forensic narrative . . . [The Big Fat Surprise] is a lacerating indictment of Big Public Health . . . More than a book about food and health or even hubris; it is a tragedy for our information age. From the very beginning, we had the statistical means to understand why things did not add up; we had a boatload of Cassandras, a chorus of warnings; but they were ignored, castigated, suppressed. We had our big fat villain, and we still do.” (The Wall Street Journal)
"This is a striking study..which may well change the way you eat. I, for one, won’t ever hesitate to order a steak again.” (Financial Times)
"Read Teicholz's excellent book and tell me you aren't convinced she's right." (Chicago Sun-Times)
"Teicholz has done a remarkable job in analysing. . . [the] weakscience, strong personalities, vested interests, and political expediency." (British Medical Journal)
"Thisis the most provocative and assumption-shredding food book I've read inyears.... All in all, a must read." (Tom Phillpot Mother Jones)
"It's so important for everyone to read this book." (Alice Waters )
"Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise is essential reading on the saturated fat debate . . . Blew my mind." (Malcolm Gladwell )
"The Big Fat Surprise is a gripping narrative. . . Teicholz reminds us to critically question research and, more importantly, challenge unjustified extrapolation. . . Researchers, clinicians, and health policy advisors should read this provocative book." (Stuart Spencer The Lancet)
"This book should be read by every nutritional science professional...All scientists should read it as an example of how limited science can become federal policy....well-research and clearly written....Teicholz compiled a historical treatise on how scientific belief (vs. evidence), nongovernment organizations, food manufacturers, government agencies, and moneyed interests promised more than they could deliver and, in the process, quite possibly contributed to the current world-wide obesity epidemic." (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
I remember the day I stopped worrying about eating fat. It was long before I started poring over thousands of scientific studies and conducting hundreds of interviews to write this book. Like most Americans, I was following the low-fat advice set forth by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in its food pyramid, and when the Mediterranean diet was introduced in the 1990s, I added olive oil and extra servings of fish while cutting back further on red meat. In following these guidelines, I was convinced that I was doing the best I could for my heart and my waistline, since official sources have been telling us for years that the optimal diet emphasizes lean meats, fruits, vegetables, and grains and that the healthiest fats come from vegetable oils. Avoiding the saturated fats found in animal foods, especially, seemed like the most obvious measure a person could take for good health.
Then, around 2000, I moved to New York City and started writing a restaurant review column for a small paper. It didn’t have a budget to pay for meals, so I usually ate whatever the chef decided to send out to me. Suddenly I was eating gigantic meals with foods that I would have never before allowed to pass my lips: pâté, beef of every cut prepared in every imaginable way, cream sauces, cream soups, foie gras—all the foods I had avoided my entire life.
Eating these rich, earthy dishes was a revelation. They were complex and remarkably satisfying. I ate with abandon. And yet, bizarrely, I found myself losing weight. In fact, I soon lost the 10 pounds that had dogged me for years, and my doctor told me that my cholesterol numbers were fine.
I might have thought no more about it had my editor at Gourmet not asked me to write a story about trans fats, which were little known at the time and certainly nowhere near as notorious as they are today. My article received a good deal of attention and led to a book contract.
The deeper I dug into my research, however, the more I became convinced that the story was far larger and more complex than trans fats. Trans fats seemed to be merely the latest scapegoat for the country’s health problems.
The more I probed, the greater was my realization that all our dietary recommendations about fat—the ingredient about which our health authorities have obsessed most during the past sixty years—appeared to be not just slightly offtrack but completely wrong. Almost nothing that we commonly believe today about fats generally and saturated fat in particular appears, upon close examination, to be accurate.
Finding out the truth became, for me, an all-consuming, nine-year obsession. I read thousands of scientific papers, attended conferences, learned the intricacies of nutrition science, and interviewed pretty much every single living nutrition expert in the United States, some several times, plus scores more overseas. I also interviewed dozens of food company executives to understand how that behemoth industry influences nutrition science. The results were startling.
There’s a popular assumption that the profit-driven food industry must be at the root of all our dietary troubles, that somehow food companies are responsible for corrupting nutrition recommendations toward their own corporate ends. And it’s true, they’re no angels. In fact, the story of vegetable oils, including trans fats, is partly about how food companies stifled science to protect an ingredient vital to their industry.
Yet I discovered that on the whole, the mistakes of nutrition science could not primarily be pinned on the nefarious interests of Big Food. The source of our misguided dietary advice was in some ways more disturbing, since it seems to have been driven by experts at some of our most trusted institutions working toward what they believed to be the public good.
Part of the problem is easy to understand. These researchers ran up against an enduring problem in nutrition science, which is that much of it turns out to be highly fallible. Most of our dietary recommendations are based on studies that try to measure what people eat and then follow them for years to see how their health fares. It is, of course, extremely difficult to trace a direct line from a particular element in the diet to disease outcomes many years later, especially given all the other lifestyle factors and variables at play. The data that emerge from these studies are weak and impressionistic. Yet in the drive to fight heart disease (and later obesity and diabetes), these weak data have had to suffice. And this compromise by researchers appears to have driven many of nutrition policy’s failures: well-intentioned experts, hastening to address growing epidemics of chronic disease, simply overinterpreted the data.
Indeed, the disturbing story of nutrition science over the course of the last half-century looks something like this: scientists responding to the skyrocketing number of heart disease cases, which had gone from a mere handful in 1900 to being the leading cause of death by 1950, hypothesized that dietary fat, especially of the saturated kind (due to its effect on cholesterol), was to blame. This hypothesis became accepted as truth before it was properly tested. Public health bureaucracies adopted and enshrined this unproven dogma. The hypothesis became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health. And the normally self-correcting mechanism of science, which involves constantly challenging one’s own beliefs, was disabled. While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. And the whole system by which ideas are canonized as fact seems to have failed us.
Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them. One of the twentieth century’s most revered nutrition scientists, the organic chemist David Kritchevsky, discovered this thirty years ago when, on a panel for the National Academy of Sciences, he suggested loosening the restrictions on dietary fat.
“We were jumped on!” he told me. “People would spit on us! It’s hard to imagine now, the heat of the passion. It was just like we had desecrated the American flag. They were so angry that we were going against the suggestions of the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health.”
This kind of reaction met all experts who criticized the prevailing view on dietary fat, effectively silencing any opposition. Researchers who persisted in their challenges found themselves cut off from grants, unable to rise in their professional societies, without invitations to serve on expert panels, and at a loss to find scientific journals that would publish their papers. Their influence was extinguished and their viewpoints lost. As a result, for many years the public has been presented with the appearance of a uniform scientific consensus on the subject of fat, especially saturated fat, but this outward unanimity was only made possible because opposing views were pushed aside.
Unaware of the flimsy scientific scaffolding upon which their dietary guidelines rest, Americans have dutifully attempted to follow them. Since the 1970s, we have successfully increased our fruits and vegetables by 17 percent, our grains by 29 percent, and reduced the amount of fat we eat from 43 percent to 33 percent of calories or less. The share of those fats that are saturated has also declined, according to the government’s own data. (In these years, Americans also began exercising more.) Cutting back on fat has clearly meant eating more carbohydrates such as grains, rice, pasta, and fruit. A breakfast without eggs and bacon, for instance, is usually one of cereal or oatmeal; low-fat yogurt, a common breakfast choice, is higher in carbohydrates than the whole-fat version, because removing fat from foods nearly always requires adding carbohydrate-based “fat replacers” to make up for lost texture. Giving up animal fats has also meant shifting over to vegetable oils, and over the past century the share of these oils has grown from zero to almost 8 percent of all calories consumed by Americans, by far the biggest change in our eating patterns during that time.
In this period, the health of America has become strikingly worse. When the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet was first officially recommended to the public by the American Heart Association (AHA) in 1961, roughly one in seven adult Americans was obese. Forty years later, that number was one in three. (It’s heartbreaking to realize that the federal government’s “Healthy People” goal for 2010, a project begun in the mid-1990s, for instance, was simply to return the public back to levels of obesity seen in 1960, and even that goal was unreachable.) During these decades, we’ve also seen rates of diabetes rise drastically from less than 1 percent of the adult population to more than 11 percent, while heart disease remains the leading cause of death for both men and women. In all, it’s a tragic picture for a nation that has, according to the government, faithfully been following all the official dietary guidelines for so many years. If we’ve been so good, we might fairly ask, why is our health report card so bad?
It’s possible to think of the low-fat, near-vegetarian diet of the past half-century as an uncontrolled experiment on the entire American population, significantly altering our traditional diet with unintended results. That may sound like a dramatic assertion, and I never would have believed it myself, but one of the most astonishing things I learned over the course of my research was that for thirty years after the low-fat diet had been officially recommended and we were taking its supposed benefits for granted, it had not been subjected to a large-scale, formal scientific trial. Finally, there was the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a trial that enrolled 49,000 women in 1993 with the expectation that when the results came back, the benefits of a low-fat diet would be validated once and for all. But after a decade of eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains while cutting back on meat and fat, these women not only failed to lose weight, but they also did not see any significant reduction in their risk for either heart disease or cancer of any major kind. WHI was the largest and longest trial ever of the low-fat diet, and the results indicated that the diet had quite simply failed.
Now, in 2014, a growing number of experts has begun to acknowledge the reality that making the low-fat diet the centerpiece of nutritional advice for six decades has very likely been a bad idea. Even so, the official solution continues to be more of the same. We are still advised to eat a diet of mostly fruits, vegetables, and whole grains with modest portions of lean meat and low-fat dairy. Red meat is still virtually banned, as are whole-fat milk, cheese, cream, butter, and, to a lesser extent, eggs.
A line of argument in favor of eating these whole-fat animal foods has sprung up among cookbook authors and “foodies,” who can’t believe that all the things their grandparents ate could really be so bad for them. There are also the Paleo eaters, who swap information on Internet blogs and survive on little else but red meat. Many of these recent animal foods devotees have been inspired by the doctor whose name is most closely associated with the high-fat diet: Robert C. Atkins. As we will see, his ideas have endured to a surprising extent and have been the subject of a great deal of scholarship and scientific research in recent years. But newspapers still carry alarming headlines about how red meat causes cancer and heart disease, and most nutrition experts will tell you that saturated fat is absolutely to be avoided. Hardly anyone advises otherwise.
In writing this book, I had the advantage of approaching the field as a scientifically minded outsider free from affiliation with or funding from any entrenched views. I’ve reviewed nutrition science from the dawn of the field in the 1940s up until today to find the answer to the questions: Why are we avoiding dietary fat? Is that a good idea? Is there a health benefit to avoiding saturated fat and eating vegetable oils instead? Is olive oil truly the key to a disease-free long life? And are Americans better off having attempted to rid the food supply of trans fats? This book does not offer recipes or specific dietary recommendations, but it does arrive at some general conclusions about the best balance of macronutrients for a healthy diet.
In my research I specifically avoided relying upon summary reports, which tend to pass along received wisdoms and, as we’ll see, can unwittingly perpetuate bad science. Instead, I’ve gone back to read all the original studies myself and in some cases have sought out obscure data that were never intended to be found. This book therefore contains many fresh and often alarming revelations about flaws in the foundational work of nutrition as well as the surprising ways in which it was both ill-conceived and misinterpreted.
What I found, incredibly, was not only that it was a mistake to restrict fat but also that our fear of the saturated fats in animal foods—butter, eggs, and meat—has never been based in solid science. A bias against these foods developed early on and became entrenched, but the evidence mustered in its support never amounted to a convincing case and has since crumbled away.
This book lays out the scientific case for why our bodies are healthiest on a diet with ample amounts of fat and why this regime necessarily includes meat, eggs, butter, and other animal foods high in saturated fat. The Big Fat Surprise takes us through the dramatic twists and turns of fifty years of nutrition science and lays out the evidence, so that a reader can fully understand the evidence to see for him- or herself how we arrived at our present understanding. At its heart, this book is a scientific investigation, but it is also a story about the strong personalities who corralled colleagues into believing their ideas. These ambitious, crusading researchers launched the entire American population, and subsequently the rest of the world, on the low-fat, near-vegetarian diet, a regime that ironically may have directly exacerbated many of the ills it was intended to cure.
For all of us who have spent much of our lives believing and following this diet, it is of vital importance to understand how and what went wrong, as well as where we might go from here. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product details
- ASIN : B00A25FDUA
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (May 13, 2014)
- Publication date : May 13, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 5334 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 497 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #76,320 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #12 in Paleo Diets
- #13 in Weight Loss Food Counters
- #16 in Medical Nutrition (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Nina Teicholz is an investigative science journalist and author. Her international bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise has upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat--especially saturated fat--and has challenged the very core of our nutrition policy.
The executive editor of "The Lancet" wrote, "this is a disquieting book about scientific incompetence, evangelical ambition, and ruthless silencing of dissent that has shaped our lives for decades…researchers, clinicians, and health policy advisors should read this provocative book. ”A review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition said, “This book should be read by every scientist…[and] every nutritional science professional.” In the BMJ (British Medical Journal), the journal's former editor wrote, “Teicholz has done a remarkable job in analysing [the] weak science, strong personalities, vested interests, and political expediency” of nutrition science.
The Big Fat Surprise was named a 2014 *Best Book* by The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Mother Jones, and Library Journal. It was named one of the best Nutrition audiobooks of all time" by BookAuthority.
Teicholz's writing has also been published in The BMJ, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Independent, and The New Yorker, among others. In addition, Teicholz is the Executive Director of The Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit group that promotes evidence-based nutrition policy. She has testified before the Canadian Senate and U.S. Department of Agriculture about the need for reform of dietary guidelines.
Teicholz attended Yale and Stanford where she studied biology and majored in American Studies. She has a master’s degree from Oxford University and served as associate director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
A former vegetarian of 25+ years, from Berkeley, CA, Teicholz now lives in New York city with her husband and two sons.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2022
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Great read!
And I'm the daughter of a librarian so I've read a lot!
The scale of research and science Nina has reviewed is nothing short of gargantuan. Every chapter is compelling & shocking in what she reviews about the atrocious history of nutritional medicine.
I love this book (& Nina's subsequent work to change the US dietary guidelines) so much that I travelled to Colorado mountains from Australia this week to meet her!
I've also totally changed my diet to low carb high fat, lost 13 kgs (26lbs), stopped my terrible knee pain, migraines, pre-diabetes blood sugars, headaches, eczema and mild depression. And now I'm super happy as I've just bought 2 pairs of US sized 2 jeans!
Our fear of healthy natural fats has made us sick, inflamed & fat. You have to get this book if you want to know why!
I initially thought this would overlap too much with the Gary Taube's books (Good Calories, Bad Calories, Why we get fat, the case against sugar) and Dr. Catherine Shanahn's Deep Nutrition but instead it is a nice complement to them,.
Ms. Teicholtz has obviously put a lot of time and effort (not always the same) into this work and it is very illuminating. I for one am most appreciative that she took the effort to write this book.
It had been proven well before Keyes launched his crusade against saturated fat that it could not have been the cause of the escalation of heart attacks. Just the extraordinary health of the Inuit, on the world’s highest diet of saturated fat (and no carbs) was proof enough, and most other indigenous groups could also have been used as proof. By the time studies had finally exonerated saturated fat, the blame had been shifted to cholesterol, then on to LDL cholesterol, now to oxidized and small dense LDL cholesterol. The real culprit, was, of course, laying there, growing fat, in plain sight the whole time. Just read Gary Taubes’ book “The Case Against Sugar”.
It is now clear that the immediate cause of most heart disease is inflammation. So the question, should be, “What causes this inflammation?”. The short answer: “Insulin resistance” is the dominant cause, which is where the sugar comes in, though other factors are also sometimes important, such as smoking and plant lectins like gluten (see Steven Gundry’s book on “The Plant Paradox”). Inflammation can damage the arterial walls directly, as well as the LDL.
Statin pills reduce the risk of heart attacks in some people, at least a little, not because they reduce LDL, which is highly beneficial, especially for healthy cell membranes, but because they reduce inflammation. Search for a “spacedoc” (Duane Gravelin) article on “Inflammation and Heart Disease”. But a diet that is low in carbs, especially sugar, and high in fats, especially saturated fat, is an order of magnitude more effective in reducing inflammation and its manifold consequences. The biggest weakness in Teicholz’s book is that it does not dive into these topics like it could have, ending with the chapter on “Why Saturated Fat Is Good for You”, instead of one on “Why Cholesterol Is Also Good for You”.
Having had a mild heart attack, fixed by a stent, 6 months ago, my cardiologist put me on rosuvostatin. After learning how this works, or rather, doesn’t work, I’ve taken myself off the statin. Actually I hadn’t done that badly over the last 30 years, with lots of hiking and biking and a mostly veggie diet supplemented by dairy and fish, with carbs and sugars kept in check. In fact, the ratios from my lipoprotein panel (total cholesterol / HDL, etc) were right on, or were better than, the targets values, showing how weak these tests are. Thanks to Nina’s book and others, like “Eat Rich, Live Long” by Cummins & Gerber, I’m well into a strong low carb – high fat diet and doing much better.
One more note: Contrary to what Teicholz suggests, olive oil was used for cooking in ancient times, not just for lamps and ointments. Just read the Bible. Cooking may have been the least glamorous of its many uses, but olive oil was, perhaps, the most valuable trading commodity in the Roman Empire.
Top reviews from other countries


It is all those and more.
To readers without my prior knowledge/understanding the careful way in which the various 'myths' have been generated and pursued will be an amazing revelation - but the underlying message is that EVERY piece of dietary advice that is now official practice in the US and a large part of the world is WRONG!
The scientists who began the research in the 1940s began with a concept and stayed with that concept, even when the results of their experiments did not confirm their ideas.
Worryingly, the suggestion is that the current 'epidemic' of bad health hand obesity stems from this official bad advice. Is it just a conspiracy theory? I don't think so, but each reader may draw their own conclusion

1) It's beautifully written - not a single ambiguous sentence.
2) It's impeccably researched.
3) It will give you a healthy scepticism of scientific dogma.
4) It may well save your life.

