[Yosemitest]

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet


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.

[RoosterRedux]

I’ll check it out. Looks tasty.

[TalBlack]

Science shows that we have been needlessly avoiding meat, cheese, whole milk, and eggs for decades”

Not me. Starting with the sudden jihad against eggs which popped seemingly out of nowhere when I was 11 or 12, I have ignored it all. The margarine is better than butter jihad still makes me laugh.

[BobL]

Nina is OUTSTANDING!

[pepsi_junkie]

I read "The Big Fat Surprise" and it was eye opening about how much of the American Heart Association directives came from almost religious like fervor of one man's opinion, not backed up with hard data. One doctor, Ansel Keyes, single handedly made dietary fat public enemy number one starting in the 50s and up through the 70s. He used rigged studies to do it, rigged by cherry picking the populations he used to emphaisize those that fit his theory and leave out those that contradicted it (for example he explicitly cut the data from France and Switzerland, both of whom have very low heart disease rates but eat tons of saturate fats). In short, he lied and then used his influence to crush and bury the findings of anyone who challenged him.

And America followed his direction, issued via the AHA, AMA, and the USDA. The result. Americans got fatter, much much fatter in response. But heart disease didn't drop at all.