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

By Nina Teicholz

Not a diet book. This is really a book that covers western food science for the past 50 years. It has issues with the low fat diet, arguing that it is less healthy than a diet with beef and saturated fat.

How did we get here? How could 50+ years of research still not conclusively settle our diet debates. It's long and complex.

The nutritionists have always known that it would take decades to settle the questions about what diets are best for your health. The hypotheses, (guess really) that fat makes you fat, isn't a bad one as fat affects total cholesterol, which at one time was the only predictor for heart disease.

But the study results are never clear cut. While low fat diets lower your cholesterol, they don't lower mortality.

The book also covers the history of trans fat. The science on trans fat is far less settled than you'd think. The author doesn't like it, but she is more concerned that we have replaced trans fat with an array of processed fats and other chemicals that we really know nothing about.

The book also covers the Mediterranean diet and it's history. Apparently there are other local diets (German, Serbian) that result in just as little heart disease. However various Mediterranean authorities (From Italy, Spain & Greece) put much time and money into selling the Mediterranean diet.

I'm a little worried that parts of the book are very thick on the rhetoric. Small studies that support the safety of saturated fat "Raise intriguing questions." While Small studies that support low fat diets "Have too little data to be considered valid." I wish she would have been more consistent with the standards uses.

What do I think? I think that food science is very unsettled. You can swap butter for Olive Oil all you want, and the impact won't be as great as if you eat a variety of foods, especially vegetables, in moderation.