Book

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

Publish date:

May 13, 2014

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

A CarniWOE Must-Read

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.

Authors

Image	Author	Author Website	Twitter	Author Location
	Nina Teicholz	https://ninateicholz.com/	https://twitter.com/bigfatsurprise

Topics

	Big Sugar	Big Sugar is based on organizations like ILSI and The Sugar Association. They promote sugar as part of a healthy, balanced diet, but ignore many of the cons of sugar consumption.
	AHA	The American Heart Association promotes LDL-C as the best biomarker to predict heart disease and prefers low saturated fat diets to reduce it. However, they are possibly biased by the Seed Oil Industry.
	Big Vegetable Oil	The Vegetable Oil industry is huge and has been growing since the late 19th century. They likely dictate dietary advice to eat highly linoleic diets, while genetically modifying seeds to contain less LA due to health dangers.
	Seed Oils
	Diet-Heart Hypothesis	The diet-heart hypothesis, also known as the lipid hypothesis, proposes that there is a direct relationship between dietary fat intake, particularly saturated fat and cholesterol, and the development of heart disease. It suggests that consuming high amounts of these fats leads to an increase in blood cholesterol levels, specifically low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, which in turn contributes to the formation of atherosclerotic plaques in the arteries. Some consider this hypothesis nothing more than wishful thinking.
	Cholesterol	Cholesterol is an animal based molecule that forms cell membranes. It's a lipid known as a sterol. Cholesterol is found in all animal foods and is healthy to eat, despite the opinions set forth by the diet-heart hypothesis. Lipoproteins carry cholesterol as well as other lipids.
	Fat	Fat is a term used to describe a group of compounds known as lipids, which are organic molecules made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. Fats are an essential part of our diet and play important roles in our bodies. Animal fats with low linoleic and arachidonic acids are preferred.
	Sugar
	Carnivore Diet	The carnivore diet involves eating only animal products such as meat, fish, dairy, eggs, marrow, meat broths, organs. There are little to no plants in the diet.