A 'Big Fat Surprise' on how to eat right

Everything we think we know about how to eat right is wrong.

The advice that one must eat a low-fat diet — one that avoids meat, butter, eggs, cheese — to be healthy has been drilled into us for decades by doctors, dietitians, government, the media and TV weight-loss shows. This conclusion must be the result of thorough scientific research.

But after reading Nina Teicholz’s “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet” (Simon & Schuster, $28), one realizes that’s not true at all. Rather, Teicholz shows that in their haste to stem the tide in the 1950s of heart attacks plaguing middle-aged men — and our president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower — the medical and nutrition communities embraced very shoddy evidence supported by some very persuasive researchers and ran with it. The government jumped on the bandwagon and food manufacturers were only too happy to get on board, because they were making the products we were being persuaded to eat.

Oh, there were researchers saying, wait a minute, that’s not right, according to Teicholz’s meticulously researched book. (She spent nine years reading thousands of nutrition studies, learning about nutrition, talking with nutrition experts and food company executives.)

Instead of hearing them out, those researchers were shut out, silenced. Over and over in “The Big Fat Surprise” they tell Teicholz how after they spoke up, they were no longer given research grants. Their articles were not published in medical journals. They weren’t included on committees for powerful medical groups such as the American Heart Association (boy, does the AHA come off looking bad in this book).

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