The Big Fat Surprise

Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

By: Nina Teicholz

Narrated by: Erin Bennett

Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

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. Dish up the red meat, eggs, and whole milk!

For decades, Americans have cut back on red meat and dairy products full of “bad” saturated fats. We obediently complied with nutritional guidelines to eat “heart healthy” fats found in olive oil, fish, and nuts, and followed a Mediterranean diet heavy on fruits, vegetables, and grains. Yet the nation’s health has declined. What is going on?

In The Big Fat Surprise, Teicholz reveals how sixty years of nutrition science has gotten it so wrong: how overzealous researchers have made basic scientific mistakes that, through a mix of ego and bias, allow dangerous misrepresentations to become dogma, and how scientists who dared oppose this consensus have been ostracized. For eight years, Teicholz has pored over the massive research literature and interviewed hundreds of leading experts to unravel the shockingly distorted claims of nutrition studies. She brings these researchers to life and shows how their ambitions, loyalties, and rivalries have undermined a field of research already full of difficult pitfalls.

With a lively narrative style akin to Michael Pollan’s in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the scientific rigor of Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories, Teicholz convincingly upends the conventional wisdom about all fats. Her groundbreaking claim is that more dietary fat leads to better health, wellness, and fitness. Science shows that reducing the saturated fat in our diets has been disastrous for our health as a nation, and we can, guilt-free, welcome these “whole fats” back into our lives.

©2014 Nina Teicholz (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks

Superb history of the efforts to demonize fats

The author is a brilliant science journalist who reviews the efforts going back to the 19th century to try to establish a proper diet. Professor Ansel Keys of the University of Minnesota is the major figure, in the 1940s-1980s, in the effort to castigate fats as the major cause of heart disease. Unfortunately, he used studies which showed a correlation of fats with heart disease, but he failed to implicate the central role of sugar. Nutritional studies showing causation of heart disease by a single factor, e.g. fats, sugar, etc. are notoriously difficult to perform because of the number of years a study would have to involve, the difficulty of controlling for ancillary factors such as exercise, etc. Keys became fixated on the role of fats to the virtual exclusion of any other factors. The British researcher, Dr. John Yudkin, whose prescient work on the role of sugar, was almost totally dismissed by mainstream researchers. We are still living with the consequences of Keys recommendations.

Fortunately, researchers such as Robert Lustig, MD, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California at San Francisco are providing the general public with the dangers of sugar and, in particular, fructose.

I can highly recommend this book as an excellent background on the part played by those trumpeting the role of fats and the science of sugar in our modern diets.

Excellent objective book

Very detailed and fair treatment of a subject full of bias in America. I would be more critical then she is, but this shows she is giving " benefit of the doubt ", which means she is trying hard to be objective. This makes the book that much more believable. Good job Nina

Must read for anyone interested in good health and good food.

Illuminates the way we have all been deceived by agribusiness, politicians, unscrupulous researchers and environmentalist to believe that animal products are bad for us.

phenomenal book and information

Anyone in the fitness industry who doesn't read this will continue to have unhappy clients failing to change their body and not know why. Diet science is flawed.

Life changing!!!

It’s hard to articulate exactly how life-changing this book can be. If you have a difficult time thinking counter to the status quo you may struggle with understanding this book but this is one of many that will help you to understand that politics will basically screw up everything to get their hands on. That’s where we find ourselves at this time with the nutrition guidance we’ve been given. This book reveals quite literally the lies that we’ve been told for many decades. I challenge everyone to take a hard look at this book listen to it and seek to understand the information that is brought forth.

Very informative!

Nina has searched through innumerable sources of information and distilled it down into a very informative and easy to understand format. She exposes the hypocrisy of the nations nutritional societies. The audio performance is very engaging and easy to listen to. I highly recommend

good book from an unbiased place

I enjoyed listening to the history of fat and with bullies...greedy and terrible research ...how people have created the basis for massive metabolic disease obesity and diabetis in our country...shame on you all.

A Gift

Thank you Ms. Teicholz. You're careful, detailed investigation into a falsehood that so affects our nation's health is a gift. My heart, waistline and soul are so grateful!

Great for history not so good for nutrition

The book opens up teaching how this guy totally faked all the data. It makes statements like vegetables don’t lower rates of cancer vs lower vegetables. After all the talk on bias how do we know that isn’t?


I can’t buy anything that things vegetables don’t decrease cancer risk. Go look up the Gerson therapy, the China study, or How Not To Die.

Good for history but I can’t believe any study it references since it taught us how bogus any study can be.

UPDATE:

I listened through towards the end of the book. Things picked up for me when they talked about the evils of vegetable oil. I only have one other health book that mentions those being bad (ie.. almost no one talks about it because I have probably 15 health books). I learned a valuable lesson from this book. That statistical data is just to tell you something may be there. Make sure they tell you the mechanism (or the why it happens) this should tell us that they relate and they may have a causation relationship.

Amazing! We have all been lied to for so long!

My wife and I have been diving deep this year into diet and nutrition books and have drastically changed our lifestyle by incorporating intermittent fasting and a low-carb/keto diet. I had purchased this book a few years ago and wish I had listened to it then! It is disgusting how we have been lied to our entire lives about what constitutes a healthy diet! This book goes through the history of how the American people became part of the largest uncontrolled nutrition trial in human history based on almost no data and how the low fat diet has destroyed our health. I had read previously how Ancel Keys based his diet-heart hypothesis on Crete and the Mediterranean diet and some of the assumptions and mistakes he made, but the author does a fabulous job detailing the questionable way Keys repeatedly ignored or buried problematic data that could disprove his hypothesis and shows in detail how the entire low-fat diet is based on the study of approximately 60 middle aged men in post WWII Italy. If only half of her assertions are true I believe the man committed fraud.

The author does a great job hammering home the FACT that fat does NOT make you fat; carbohydrates, especially sugars, make you fat. She also sites study after study after clinical trial that fail show correlation between fat consumption and heart disease but many of which do link carbohydrate consumption to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, Alzheimers, depression, ADHD, and just about every other chronic disease we are dealing with today that our ancestors rarely faced because they did not have ready access to the processed grains and sugars we do today. And the really troubling part is that this information was ignored because of pride, political considerations, and profit for most of the past 100 years! She documents how it is still being ignored to this day as the agencies promoting the low-fat diet double down and repeatedly lower the amount of fat they say the average person should eat instead of admitting the low-fat diet is unhealthy. The list of nutrition scientists that had their careers destroyed because they chose to objectively look at the data was astounding.

The narration was excellent and I absolutely recommend this book to anyone that is concerned about heart disease, obesity, diabetes, or cancer. I'm evening thinking about buying the hard copy of this book.