The Big Fat Surprise

Nina Teicholz, in The Big Fat Surprise, Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, wins the food wars. Teicholz was a student of biology at Yale and Stanford Universities and earned a graduate degree from Oxford University. Nina was a nutrition science writer for Gourmet and a reporter for NPR. She was also a contributor to The New Yorker, the Economist, the Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as the associate director for the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

Nathan Myhrvold, formerly chief technology officer at Microsoft, writes about Nina Teicholz’s ground breaking book: “The Big Fat Surprise delivers on it’s title, exposing the shocking news that much of what everybody knows about a healthy diet is in fact all wrong. The 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 this book.”

Michael R. Eades, MD coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Protein Power, also weighs in on The Big Fat Surprise: “This meticulously researched book thoroughly dismantles the current dietary dogma that fat—particularly saturated fat—is bad for us. …There aren’t enough superlatives to describe this journalistic tour de force. I read it twice: once for the information, again just for the writing.”

When I am using a book as a research source, the first place I turn to is the bibliography then the index. The exhaustive 47-page bibliography in The Big Fat Surprise is impressive. I was pleased to see so much of the source material that I have used over the decades in my own independent nutritional science research.

In her concluding chapter, Nina Teicholz writes ‘The advice that comes out of this book is that a higher-fat diet is almost assuredly healthier in every way than one low in fat and high in carbohydrates. The most rigorous science now supports this statement…. pretty much the only possible way to consume enough fat for good health is to eat the saturated fats found in animal foods. Practically speaking, this means eating whole fat dairy, eggs, and meat—even fatty meat. In short: all those rich, forbidden foods we’ve denied ourselves for so long, because those foods are necessarily part of a healthy diet.”

Finally, Ms. Teicholz informs readers, “Over the past decade, a stack of top-rate scientific studies attesting to the importance of dietary fat has grown to the point where the accumulated body of evidence is nearly undeniable. A high-fat, low carbohydrate regime has been demonstrated to fight heart disease, obesity, and diabetes; it leads to better health outcomes than does the so-called Mediterranean diet in head-to-head tests; and it performs far better than the standard low-fat approach that has been recommended in Western nations for half a century. That low-fat diet, it turns out, has been terrible for health in every way.”