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The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet Hardcover – May 13, 2014

by Nina Teicholz (Author)

4.7 4,079 ratings

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A New York Times bestseller
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
Named a Best Food Book of 2014 by Mother Jones
Named one of Library Journal's Best Books 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.

Print length

496 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster
Publication date

May 13, 2014
Dimensions

6 x 1.6 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

1451624425
ISBN-13

978-1451624427
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A wonderful book [that] takes on everything we think we know about nutrition and examines it.." (Ruth Reichl, former editor-in-chief, Gourmet magazine)

About the Author

Nina Teicholz is an investigative science journalist and author as well as an advocate for evidence-based nutrition policy. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Independent, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among other places. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and now lives in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Big Fat Surprise

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (May 13, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1451624425
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1451624427
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.74 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.6 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #342,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #65 in Paleo Diet
- #130 in Low Fat Diets (Books)
- #1,989 in Other Diet Books

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Nina Teicholz

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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.

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Customers find the book meticulously researched, significant, and fascinating. They describe it as well-written and understandable. Readers say the benefits of healthy fats are made clear. Opinions are mixed on ease of use, with some finding it enjoyable and others saying it's tedious and hard to navigate.

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434 customers mention "Readability"403 positive31 negative

Customers find the book compelling, well-written, and understandable. They say it reads like a good murder mystery and is not difficult or highly technical. Readers also mention that the author weaves an interesting narrative and keeps a good pace.

"...women should focus particularly on this chapter, which also explains in a very clear and understandable way how HDL, LDL and the cholesterol science..." Read more

"Great book! Well written with evidence -based research backing...." Read more

"...Perhaps the most important aspect of this book is that it is easy to read, which cannot be said for many books with this degree of complexity...." Read more

"...The read is compelling. Its conclusions are fascinating. At times you wonder if her analysis of pro-saturated fats studies is as deeply scrutinized...." Read more

433 customers mention "Information quality"404 positive29 negative

Customers find the book meticulously researched, enlightening, and significant in many ways. They say it provides facts and helps scientists find relevant information. Readers also mention the book contains life-saving information about the Standard American Diet.

"..."The Big Fat Surprise" is a fascinating historical and technical account of a dreadful scientific misunderstanding that had its roots in 1950's..." Read more

"...Well written with evidence -based research backing. Provides both sides with historical research to modern views of past thoughts regarding diets..." Read more

"This phenomenally well-researched and written book may well be the game changer for some in the food industry as it reveals their role in expanding..." Read more

"...The read is compelling. Its conclusions are fascinating. At times you wonder if her analysis of pro-saturated fats studies is as deeply scrutinized...." Read more

30 customers mention "Fat content"30 positive0 negative

Customers find the book's fat content clear. They say it makes a compelling case for saturated fats and presents a factual guide to healthful living. Readers also mention the book is informative on the dangers of trans fats and cholesterol myths.

"...A healthy skepticism on matters of nutrition, dieting and research• A condensed history of nutrition policy, research and science•..." Read more

"...Purported to be wonder foods because they reduce total cholesterol (which it turns out may not be a particularly useful market independently), these..." Read more

"...My fasting blood sugar is 80, cholesterol went down to 166. That seems totally counter-intuitive...." Read more

"Finally the truth about fats and how they keep us healthy and THIN!" Read more

23 customers mention "Suspenseful"23 positive0 negative

Customers find the book shocking, unnerving, and disturbing. They say it's a truly shocking investigation of how a single highly-regarded scientist was able to do it. Readers also mention the content is sober and not sensationalist.

"...The revelations embodied in the book are shocking -- but upon reflection not surprising either...." Read more

"This book was a depressing eye opener...." Read more

"...The revelations are infuriating, but liberating at the same time...." Read more

"...I encourage you to read it for yourself. Ir’s both frightening and liberating." Read more

11 customers mention "Value for money"11 positive0 negative

Customers find the book invaluable, priceless, and highly readable. They say it's worth the Pulitzer prize and a great compliment to Gary Taub's books.

"...Invaluable and priceless!..." Read more

"...magisterial effort that went into this book makes it a worthy contender for a Pulitzer Prize." Read more

"...Wonderful, methodical, scholarly expose of the politics of nutrition, regulation and ego...." Read more

"This book certainly is worthy of a Pulitzer prize...." Read more

11 customers mention "Weight loss"11 positive0 negative

Customers say the book helps them lose weight, lower their blood pressure, and prevent heart attacks. They also mention that their glucose levels are reduced and all their health markers improve.

"...Once I changed my diet in the way this book describes I have lost weight effortlessly and seen my medical problems diminish or disappear...." Read more

"...Essentially low carb is low calorie because the satiation is much higher, leaving people eating less...." Read more

"...lower than I had been in my 30s, and I am now 62. All my health markers improved, and I've never felt better...." Read more

"...Our glucose levels were reduced in addition to our cholesterol...." Read more

24 customers mention "Ease of use"16 positive8 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the ease of use of the book. Some mention they feel better, sleep better, and digest better. Others say it's tedious and hard to navigate.

"...Furthermore, I feel better; more strength, more energy...." Read more

"...So, this book is about that history. There is no How To in this book...." Read more

"...book describes I have lost weight effortlessly and seen my medical problems diminish or disappear. Thank you Nina!" Read more

"...Essentially low carb is low calorie because the satiation is much higher, leaving people eating less...." Read more

9 customers mention "Length"0 positive9 negative

Customers find the book too long to hold their attention. They say it reads like a research paper and has about 75 pages of endnotes.

"...This book presents a very long narrative that attempts to examine the changes in eating habits in developed countries, specifically the instances..." Read more

"...and has the illustrations in color, it also has about 75 pages of end-notes, NONE of which are hyperlinked from the text...." Read more

"This book is about science and it is long, but it proves the power of ego or the desire to be right trumps the truth...." Read more

"Super long and detailed...." Read more

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Ivor Cummins

Excellent - a Fascinating History of the Biggest Nutrition Science Mistake of our Times

Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2014

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"Alas, thou hast misconstrued everything" (Julius Caesar 5.3.83)
So spoke Titanius to Cassius' body before turning his sword on himself, realising that Cassius had misunderstood the signs of battle, and now all was lost. Sadly, the legions of academics who totally misconstrued the place of dietary fat and cholesterol in human disease are not so willing to acknowledge their mistake. Indeed, in the main, they still do not seem to realise how wrong they were.

"The Big Fat Surprise" is a fascinating historical and technical account of a dreadful scientific misunderstanding that had its roots in 1950's America; from humble beginnings, pioneered by the nutritionist Ancel Keys, the mistaken "Diet-Heart" Hypothesis blossomed over the decades and gathered an unstoppable momentum amongst the scientific, medical and political communities (in short, the theory states that "dietary fat drives blood cholesterol which in turn drives Coronary Heart Disease). Increasingly as the ideology around this theory became entrenched, the Emperor's nakedness could not be acknowledged by the academic and medical fraternity, and the correct scientific method of proving propositions failed spectacularly. The Surprise is that such an enormous quantity of otherwise intelligent people could spin in circles and cling to a failed hypothesis, as a growing body of contradictory data emerged. Sadly, the ultimate result was the Big, Fat and Diabetic population, which we now see lumbering all around us.

Teicholz begins with an introduction that encapsulates the whole drama from a 30,000 foot viewpoint, before moving on smoothly to some of the more interesting "paradoxes" that totally undermine the Diet-Heart Hypothesis. These first chapters draw the reader into the narrative, introducing us to some fascinating historical characters who achieved great insights, illustrating how animal fat could be counted amongst the most nutritious and valuable foods that humans could consume - even when these dominated the diet to the near-exclusion of carbohydrates. Ancel Keys, however, dismissed these pivotal observations as "irrelevant" - without offering any supporting data for his position. Following this lead-in we get to the heart of the matter - a discussion of Keys' obsessive and aggressive domination of this arena over the next decades, gaining acolytes and manipulating the whole discourse, and executing carefully crafted experiments that would likely support his beliefs (or be massaged to achieve that end). These were the infamous "Six Countries" and "Seven Countries" studies, and although I was familiar with the bad science that underpinned them, I was further shocked by the extent of it. For anyone with a passing interest in their health, and the most salient scientific knowledge that informs it, this is required reading.

And how could such a misunderstanding survive to generate arguably the biggest human-health debacle of the century? Well we are about to find out, as the following chapter draws us down the rabbit-hole, into an entirely accurate and compelling history of misunderstanding, cronyism, industry influence and incompetence. The details of the conflicting evidence from multiple trials are thoroughly researched and clearly articulated here - including the groundbreaking outcome of the original and best population study (Framingham) - whose final result was rewritten to fit the prevailing ideology - the actual data muddied beyond belief into an abstract and media release that was essentially fraudulent. As you read I'm sure you will feel the urge to reach into the past and shake sense into the scientific and medical community, who had allowed themselves to be blinded by the now powerful orthodox position taken. It is a compelling lesson in academic hubris and lack of collective leadership; although many voices of sanity were raised, they lacked the character and wherewithal to band together and ensure that reason prevailed. Thus America and then the world embarked on "the largest uncontrolled experiment in the history of mankind"; and the outcome of same is shuffling all around us, caught in a Neuro-Endocrinological Disease cycle of Obesity (and paradoxically a simultaneous state of malnutrition); these are the unknowing citizens who pay the ultimate price of their society's bad science.

The following chapter is another page turner, dealing with the polyunsaturated fat debacle that has been foisted upon us all. Half-truths and misunderstandings are clearly explained, through a high-level analysis of the major experiments that led to the mistaken belief that polyunsaturated fats should replace natural saturated fats in our diet. Again, one can feel the anger rise as one realises how yet again they misconstrued the signals, and when the experiment outcomes indicated their mistake, how they forcibly pushed the unwelcome data under the research carpet. The (perhaps unintentional) dishonesty and groupthink of researchers here is nothing short of astonishing; this is a must-read for anyone who still believes the absurd suggestion that modern industrially extracted seed oils are healthier than ancestral foods that fuelled our very evolution. In fact the very opposite is demonstrably being proven true, and only now is correct advice leeching at a pitifully slow rate into the mainstream guidelines. Get ahead of the curve on this one guys - your heart and a cancer-free cellular structure will thank you for it, believe me.

Midpoint through this excellent book the story becomes even richer, as we focus on the interaction with the political sphere, with the misinformation gathering momentum through government and media involvement. During this section you may find your faith in politics dented severely - and that's good, because it means that you're intelligent; but you will also likely feel disgust and anger, and rightly so again. I won't spoil the surprise by detailing the content here, but suffice it to say that you will be amazed that you held the beliefs that we all did from birth, based on the cack-handed crap that evolved through this process of faith-based science and accompanying politicisation. The parallels with religion are not a coincidence - this was more ideology than engineering.

Teicholz now changes gear and begins to focus on the victims of the emerging ideology - those most adversely affected by deploying a low-fat dogma - the women and the children. I have spent more than a year studying cholesterol and metabolism in great depth, and I regularly stop for a moment to think how damaging the past six decades of technical incorrectness have been, particularly for this constituency. The detail and accuracy here are excellent - all women should focus particularly on this chapter, which also explains in a very clear and understandable way how HDL, LDL and the cholesterol science evolved during the period; when I think of my mother's generation onwards, being frightened away from nutritious and satiating foods that fuelled human development itself, into the bosom of substances that have no place in a healthy diet....well, read it and weep (!)

For brevity I will speed up at this point, although in the book the pace remains as steady as it is revelatory. Teicholz brings us through the Mediterranean Diet craze, the scourge of Trans Fats, the latter's even more toxic replacement in a seething battle between competing interests, and then climaxes with a perfectly balanced and thoroughly referenced final summary: "Why Saturated Fat is Good for You". And it is. Be assured that it is. Evolution attests to this. The correct interpretation of massive datasets from a six decade's long scientific quest attests to this. The art of engineering problem solving attests to this. There is no doubt for this particular technical obsessive who has studied the whole gamut over the past year. And this book is for those who will never invest in that exercise, but wish to know the truth almost as comprehensively as if they had done so.

I started this review with one of my favourite Shakespeare quotes - what would the great bard do with this story you might ask? Why, create an entertaining play to bring the important lessons to the masses - but would it be a tragedy or a farce? Perhaps a mixture of both.

Educate and entertain yourself simultaneously, by being professionally led by Teicholz through the whole debacle - one of the biggest, fattest stories of our times.

Ivor Cummins
www.thefatemperor.com

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Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2024

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Great book! Well written with evidence -based research backing. Provides both sides with historical research to modern views of past thoughts regarding diets around the world. Some page break ups with images and graphs. Enjoy cover to cover

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Tom Clayton, MD

Astonishing analytical skills and the ability to make complex topics clear

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2015

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This phenomenally well-researched and written book may well be the game changer for some in the food industry as it reveals their role in expanding the incidence of chronic diseases/conditions such as coronary heart disease, Type II diabetes, and obesity that were rare before the turn-of-the-19th-century. There were plenty of older people in the 19th century who did not get these diseases (even where the top ten causes of death were from infectious disease), but today these age groups are overwhelmed with many of these otherwise mostly avoidable diseases.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this book is that it is easy to read, which cannot be said for many books with this degree of complexity. Beginning in the 1920's, advances in technology made possible food substances that do not exist in nature, such as refined seed oils which when heated give off incredibly toxic aldehydes and a substance known as HNE. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about his own health as well as the more global social and health consequences of the population as a whole.

Her scientific analytical skills are particularly good at finding inconsistencies and contradictions in dense academic articles that escape many highly educated readers. Virtually everyone has been led to believe by official dietary policy "experts" that low fat and high carbohydrate diets (the diet-heart hypothesis) are optimal for health, when it is exactly the opposite. High saturated animal fats, low refined carbohydrates, and the elimination of most seed oils (olive oil being the least problematic) have repeatedly been shown to be optimal for health, just like they were in the 19th century and before.

In the 19th century and before, saturated animal fats were consumed almost daily and refined carbohydrates did not exist to any great extent (compared to today). This strongly suggests that most of the chronic diseases that plague us today for the most part can be avoided or prevented by a diet that emphasizes non-processed foods.

Polyunsaturated fats do lower cholesterol a small amount, but it is now being shown that an elevated blood cholesterol LDL level is not the primary mechanism of coronary artery heart disease. Ms. Teicholz convincingly shows how these misguided dietary policies have created an absolute health disaster. Low fat diets were particularly focused on eliminating saturated animal fats in favor of polyunsaturated seed oils (canola, soybean, corn, etc.). Polyunsaturated seed oils are far more dangerous and destructive than saturated fat because they have carbon double-bonds that react to create destructive compounds, particularly aldehydes.

Alarmingly, it has been known since at least 1950 that when these oils are heated even to modest levels achievable in every kitchen (again, olive oil is the least problematic), these highly toxic substances are inhaled in addition to being consumed in the final products. There is research that suggests that this is the culprit for a significantly higher degree of lung cancer than predicted in women who have never smoked who stir-fry in enclosed spaces.

Many otherwise well-meaning women in the last 30 years took "expert" dietary advice very seriously and fed their children very low-fat diets, which has been shown to adversely affect intelligence, growth, and other essential aspects of development. The conclusion is inescapable; we are a nation that is far sicker and overweight than ever before in our history, and it can be traced directly to now provably incorrect conclusions that saturated animal fats are bad and carbohydrates are good.

Political pressure has compelled many restaurants to get rid of beef tallow and other healthy saturated animal fats used to fry food for polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Particularly since TRANS fats were removed, these oils are more toxic than ever before. Instead of doing the right thing, which is to go back to saturated animal fats, some large restaurant chains developed special ventilation hoods that are not economically feasible for most people in their kitchens. In large part because of the Internet and books of this type, many members of the public are learning the truth and taking steps to prevent these otherwise avoidable diseases.

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Inés Viñas

Rotundo, riguroso y necesario

Reviewed in Spain on August 24, 2024

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Si de mí dependiera, lo incluiría como libro de lectura obligatoria para cualquiera que pretenda dedicarse a la sanidad o la salud. Ojalá quienes nos inculcan ese miedo atroz a la grasa tuvieran el valor y la capacidad de análisis objetivo de esta mujer. Un libro imprescindible.

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Non

Fantastic review of all the available research studies, including all the people politics.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 12, 2024

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I read this thoroughly and wholeheartedly agree with all the conclusions that a low fat diet is harmful compared to a low carb high(normal) fat way of eating, which is also in agreement with all of the other uptodate doctors and researches that I have read and listened to. High fat low carb is also better than a Mediterranean diet. I would recommend this to everyone who wants to live longer and healthier.
It is very well researched and looks at all of the pros and cons in all the research.
I wish more doctors would read this.

DK13000

Un classique

Reviewed in France on March 3, 2024

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Livre qu'il faut avoir lu si on est intéressé pour comprendre le fonctionnement du cholestérol dans l'organisme et pourquoi il ne faut pas diaboliser le gras.
Il m'a ouvert les yeux sur les régimes cétoniques, même si à l'époque je n'ai pas franchi le pas. Il a été utile pour interroger mes croyances en diététiques

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Cliente Amazon

The best book ever

Reviewed in Italy on June 1, 2023

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Mind blowing! The best read ever! It shows how we've been brainwashed for decades about our nutrition. It's a shame it's not translated in all languages.

Sten

Too detailed

Reviewed in Sweden on May 5, 2023

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Complicated and boring, who reads all this?

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The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet Hardcover – May 13, 2014

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