Note: Over the next few weeks, I will be publishing some of my papers written for my Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner certification. This is a review of the excellent book, The Big Fat Surprise, by Nina Teicholz.
In her 2014 book, The Big Fat Surprise, Nina Teicholz takes us on a tour of the history of fat philosophy for the western world. The 20th century saw a few new food philosophies surface, but none which made such far reaching impact as the low-fat diet recommendation, which through the coordinated work of government health advisories and regulating organizations, the medical industry, and the farm industry, not only drove public opinion and influenced the thinking of millions of Americans—and soon after, the rest of the western world—but changed the supply chain for foods, distribution, farming, and manufacturing.
Nina, a food journalist in New York City, was surprised to find that she lost 10lbs and felt better than ever while feasting on the rich foods she had to eat while reviewing top restaurants. She knew there had to be more to the story than “eat fat, become fat” so she began a nine year long journey of research, including interviewing every nutritional expert in the US and dozens abroad. When she came across startling information about trans-fats, which had been intentionally buried for decades, she knew she had to tell the story of how the food company industry influences nutritional studies for their profit, and how this is backed and protected by government agencies even though the many scientific studies have required altering, tampering, discarding data, mislabeling the fats studied, or other egregious sins of science to keep the whole charade going. This is that story.
Ask anyone if fat is bad for you, and you’re very likely to get an answer that was influenced by the false science run as a propaganda machine from the 1930s to the present. Is saturated fat bad for you? Will it clog your arteries? Does it make you gain weight more readily than a diet higher in carbohydrates? Isn’t a low fat diet, a high vegetable oil diet, or a Mediterranean diet better for heart health? For cancer prevention? For life-expectancy? Won’t high cholesterol give you heart disease?
The answer to all of these questions is no: the true science does not and did not support any of these conclusions. Nina states that “well intentioned experts, hastening to address the growing epidemic of chronic disease, simply over-interpreted the data.” (pg. 3) Even abstract guidelines such as “The Mediterranean diet” were aberrations, constructed as theoretical diets by researchers biased toward plant eating and away from meats, and do not have true ties to any of the long-lived people groups dwelling along the Mediterranean Sea. Those people don’t actually eat the foods listed in that diet in those proportions, and never have in their millennia of longevity.
All of the assumptions about saturated fat being unhealthful for humans was based on a hypothesis of a few researchers with strong personalities within the science community. Once this hypothesis became accepted, they silenced the many researchers who stood in opposition to the view. The US public, terrified of the growing epidemics of obesity, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, dutifully tried to comply with the recommendations, not knowing how shaky was the scaffolding upon which they stood. As a result, diets changed to included less fat of all kinds, but particularly saturated fats, and an increase in carbohydrate consumption. What has been the health result of the revised diet? Nina states: “It’s heartbreaking to realize that the federal government’s “Healthy People” goal of 2010, a project begun in the mid-1990s, was simply to return the public back to levels of obesity seen in 1960, and even that goal was unreachable.” (pg.5)
This book details the scientific history for the case that diets high in fat, especially saturated fats from whole food sources, are a major part of a healthful diet leading to long life and high quality of life. These foods include meat butter and eggs. Vegetable oils can be used within this diet, but should not be seen as superior in offering better health, and as a warning, can be far more dangerous if heated or processed. This information is consistent with the information coming out of modern-day disseminators of food science, such as the Weston A Price Foundation, and my nutrition training through Nutritional Therapy Association.
For those who spent time following a low-fat or low-saturated-fat diet, this book speaks to what went wrong, how it went wrong, and where we go from here.
Citation:
Teicholz (2014), The Big Fat Surprise, Simon and Schuster
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