Big Fat Surprise: why butter, meat, and cheese belong in a healthy diet: Why Meat, Butter, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet - Softcover

Nina Teicholz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1922247774 ISBN 13: 9781922247773

Publisher: Scribe Publications, 2014

Synopsis

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 itself is the problem? What if the very foods we've been denying ourselves - the creamy cheeses, the sizzling steaks - are themselves the key to reversing epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease? In this captivating, vibrant and convincing narrative, based on a nine-year investigation, Teicholz shows how the misinformation about saturated fats took hold of the scientific community 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 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.

About this title

Review:

[Teicholz] has a gift for translating complex data into an engaging forensic narrative... [The Big Fat Surprise] is a lacerating indictment of Big Public Health ... More than a book about food and health or even hubris; it is a tragedy for our information age. From the very beginning, we had the statistical means to understand why things did not add up; we had a boatload of Cassandras, a chorus of warnings; but they were ignored, castigated, suppressed. We had our big fat villain, and we still do. Wall Street Journal / Solid, well-reported science ... Like a bloodhound, Teicholz tracks the process by which a hypothesis morphs into truth without the benefit of supporting data. --Kirkus

Ms Teicholz s book is a gripping read for anyone who has ever tried to eat healthily ... This is not an obvious page-turner. But it is ... The vilification of fat, argues Ms Teicholz, does not stand up to closer examination. She pokes holes in famous pieces of research the Framingham heart study, the Seven Countries study, the Los Angeles Veterans Trial, to name a few describing methodological problems or overlooked results, until the foundations of this nutritional advice look increasingly shaky. --The Economist

A striking study ... which may well change the way you eat. I, for one, won t ever hesitate to order a steak again. ERICA WAGNER, Financial Times / Someone ought to hand a copy of The Big Fat Surprise to the Department of Health. --KATE SPICER, Red

About the Author:

Nina Teicholz has written for Gourmet Magazine, The New Yorker, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She lives in New York with her husband and two sons.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1922247774
• ISBN 13: 9781922247773
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496