The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

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 is itself the problem? What if the very
foods we’ve been denying ourselves—the creamy cheeses, the sizzling
steaks—are themselves the key to reversing the epidemics of obesity,
diabetes, and heart disease?

In this captivating, vibrant, and
convincing narrative, based on a nine-year-long 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. 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. Science shows that we have been
needlessly avoiding meat, cheese, whole milk, and eggs for decades and
that we can now, guilt-free, welcome these delicious foods back into our
lives.