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

Front Cover
Simon and Schuster, May 13, 2014 - Health & Fitness - 496 pages
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


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.

From inside the book

Contents

Cartoon on LowFat Dieting
172
What Is the Science?
174
Anna FerroLuzzi USDA Pyramid 180
180
Mediterranean Diet Pyramid 1993
187
Exit Saturated Fats Enter Trans Fats
225
Sokolof Advertisement Appearing in the New York Times
229
Exit Trans Fats Enter Something Worse?
259
Why Saturated Fat Is Good for You
286

Cartoon of the Changing Cholesterol Story
66
The Flawed Science of Saturated versus
72
Consumption of Fats in the United States 19091999
83
The LowFat Diet Goes to Washington
103
Meat Availability and Consumption in the United States 18002007
115
Time March 26 1984
132
How Women and Children Fare on a LowFat Diet
135
Cartoon of Restaurant
139
Cartoon of Eskimo Diets
288
The New York Times Magazine Cover July 7 2002
312
Rates of Obesity in the United States 19712006
328
Acknowledgments
339
Glossary
405
Permissions
457
Copyright

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About the author (2014)

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.

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