BOOK REVIEW: THE BIG FAT SURPRISE, WHY BUTTER MEAT AND CHEESE BELONG IN A HEALTHY DIET BY NINA TEICHOLZ

This is a remarkably well-researched story of how America learned to fear saturated fat and why that may have been the most tragic mistake our medical profession ever made. Teicholz spent 9 years going back and doing fresh analysis on the studies that were used to justify the Diet Heart hypothesis that started with researcher Ancel Keys and an elite group of doctors and researchers who still control the government agencies that set dietary policy used in all of our institutions – homes for the elderly, assisted living facilities, prisons, hospitals, school lunch programs and more. The problem is that the actual data never supported the concept of a low fat diet, and the data they did have was based largely on studies of middle aged men at risk for heart disease. Wanting to extend the benefits to the rest of the population, they included women and children in those recommendations. Unfortunately, what the data actually shows is that the low fat diet is harmful to children, causing stunted growth and failure to thrive, and it is also unhealthy for women, who need dietary fat for many reasons including reproduction.

Contrary to their assumptions, which we all learned in school, fat in your diet does not cause the fat on your body. The storage of fat is controlled by hormones, especially insulin, an excess of which is the logical result of the low fat diet which advocates eating up to 65% of your calories in carbohydrates, which become sugar when metabolized. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There are essential amino acids in proteins, and there are essential fatty acids, particularly in saturated fats from animal sources, but we have extensive records of societies like the Inuit in Alaska and the Masai in Africa, who maintain exceptional health on diets almost entirely devoid of carbohydrates. We also have documented cases of such isolated groups developing heart disease, diabetes, tooth decay and cancer once Western Foods such as white flour and sugar are introduced to these formerly healthy populations.

Another important fact that went overlooked is that you need to eat adequate fat along with the protein in your diet in order to metabolize it properly. Americans have followed their recommendations for the last sixty years, eating less red meat, switching to polyunsaturated fats over saturated fats, increasing consumption of grains, fruit and vegetables and the result has been rising rates of heart disease, cancer and metabolic syndrome which leads to diabetes. There is now a body of evidence that proves that humans thrive on a diet of red meat, butter, animal fats and full fat dairy and cheeses, but the proponents of the Diet Heart hypothesis still do their best to marginalize and shout down the people like Dr. Atkins and Gary Taubes who have advocated a return to the high fat whole foods diet that is natural for human beings. The 60 year experiment that was the low fat diet has failed miserably and I hope that more people wake up to this fact soon.

One of the most harmful effects of the experiment was to encourage people to switch from healthy saturated fats to industrial seed oils which used to be considered inedible until someone invented Crisco. People cut out natural products like butter and lard in favor of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils full of trans fats, which became ubiquitous in packaged foods. Once people became aware of the dangers of trans fats, many of them switched to liquid oils like soybean and canola. These are still unnatural, industrial products which become unstable at high beats such as those used in fast food restaurants. These oils produce a gunk that requires industrial cleaning, and permeates the lungs and the uniforms of the food service workers in those restaurants. Those uniforms are known to spontaneously combust during and after cleaning because it can’t really be totally removed. What are these oils doing to our bodies when we consume them? McDonald’s built its reputation on French fries fried in beef tallow – a delicious, stable fat that does not oxidize at high temperatures and is not linked to colon cancer as industrial seed oils are. I wish they’d go back to that (I hear Buffalo Wild Wings does use tallow) because it’s much healthier than the industrial oils that are not normal parts of the human diet.

I’m barely hitting the high points. This book is a thorough accounting of the process – the frustrating, ego-driven, bureaucratic and excessively political process – that got us to the point of fearing our natural human diet of whole animal foods which sustained us for the many millennia that we’ve existed in this earth. I hope the information in this book spreads widely because it can literally save lives.