The big fat surprise

why butter, meat, and cheese belong in a healthy diet

479 pages

English language

Published Dec. 29, 2014

ISBN:
978-1-4516-2442-7
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OCLC Number:
964431858

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2 stars (1 review)

Investigative journalist Nina Teicholz reveals here 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, we are not trying hard enough. But what if the low-fat diet is itself the problem? Based on a nine-year 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. She upends the conventional wisdom with …

1 edition

Review of 'The big fat surprise' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

A wearying point-by-point takedown of everything Ansel Keys ever did. Another reviewer pointed out this book could be excellent source material for a future decent book on the topic - because this one isn't it.

Was there solid science behind the diet-heart hypothesis and the focus on reducing fat to lower cholesterol? Definitely not. Did the recommended low-fat diets cause harm to the generations that followed them? Possibly. Is there too much industry money in the American Heart Association and the RDA? Obviously, but that could be said about most "scientific" groups in government - from big-oil funded environmental research to the corn industry research into alternative fuels.

So two interesting books here - the effects of diet on health (full body and just the heart, at least what we know) and the fraternity approach to science and the RDA (ala Mad Men, perhaps). The problem with this book is …

Subjects

  • Nutrition
  • Lipids in human nutrition
  • Diet
  • Fat
  • Saturated fatty acids in human nutrition