The Big Fat Surprise Quotes

“If, in recommending that Americans avoid meat, cheese, milk, cream, butter, eggs, and the rest, it turns out that nutrition experts made a mistake, it will have been a monumental one. Measured just by death and disease, and not including the millions of lives derailed by excess weight and obesity, it’s very possible that the course of nutrition advice over the past sixty years has taken an unparalleled toll on human history. It now appears that since 1961, the entire American population has, indeed, been subjected to a mass experiment, and the results have clearly been a failure. Every reliable indicator of good health is worsened by a low-fat diet. Whereas diets high in fat have been shown, again and again, in a large body of clinical trials, to lead to improved measures for heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes, and are better for weight loss. Moreover, it’s clear that the original case against saturated fats was based on faulty evidence and has, over the last decade, fallen apart. Despite more than two billion dollars in public money spent trying to prove that lowering saturated fat will prevent heart attacks, the diet-heart hypothesis has not held up.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“That heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer might be caused by the kinds of carbohydrates consumed in modern diets has also been the conclusion of many doctors and researchers who observed primitive populations as they began to eat these foods.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“In the end, what we believe to be true—our conventional wisdom—is really nothing more than sixty years of misconceived nutrition research. Before 1961, there were our ancestors, with their recipes. And before them, there were their ancestors, with their hunting bows or traps or livestock—but like lost languages, lost skills, and lost songs, it takes only a few generations to forget.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. And the whole system by which ideas are canonized as fact seems to have failed us.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Westman has written poignantly about the predicament of working toward paradigm change when the existing bias is so strong: “When an unscientific fear of dietary fat pervades the culture so much that researchers who are on study sections that provide funding will not allow research into high-fat diets for fear of “harming people.’” as we’ve seen at the NIH and AHA, “this situation will not allow science to self-correct.’ A sort of scientific taboo is created because of the low likelihood of funding, and the funding agencies are off the hook because they say that researchers are not submitting requests for grants.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The main problem with all these newly developed fats and fat replacers coming out of food company laboratories is that their effects on health have barely been studied.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Food manufacturers, from Big Food to the corner bakery, came to rely upon hydrogenated oils because they’re cheaper than butter and lard”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The food world is particularly prey to corruption, because so much money is made on food and so much depends on talk and especially the opinions of experts.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The AHA even rode the profit wave of refined carbohydrates from the 1990s onward by charging a hefty fee for the privilege of putting the AHA’s “Heart Healthy” check mark on products, with the label ending up on some dubious candidates, such as Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies, and low-fat Pop-Tarts.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“What I found, incredibly, was not only that it was a mistake to restrict fat but also that our fear of the saturated fats in animal foods—butter, eggs, and meat—has never been based in solid science.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The practice of good science requires that when we observe something that doesn’t fit a hypothesis, these observations need to be reckoned with somehow.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“It was a Kafkaesque circle of reasoning. Keys’s hypothesis had evidently managed to sail over the normal hurdles of scientific proof such that the mere act of testing the diet was now considered unethical.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Simply put, there were some ten million Americans of a prime age for having a heart attack at the turn of the twentieth century, but heart attacks appeared not to have been a common problem.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“the NIH held a series of workshops in the 1980s to address the fact that the early clinical trials using diets high in soybean oil showed subjects dying of cancer at alarmingly elevated rates. Gallstones were also associated with diets high in vegetable oils.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“We removed one ingredient—the shortening—and had to add six to replace it.” These kinds of complex solutions, involving artificial stews of multiple ingredients, were necessary for most food product reformulations but, it must be said, they would not have been if the food industry had just been using butter, lard, or tallow all along.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The day the FDA rule came out, there were partially hydrogenated oils in some 42,720 packaged food products, including 100 percent of crackers, 95 percent of cookies, 85 percent of breading and croutons, 75 percent of baking mixes, 70 percent of chip-type snacks, 65 percent of margarines, and 65 percent of pie shells, frosting, and chocolate chips.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The beginning of the end for trans fats came not from any American scientist, since critics of trans fats in the US research community had effectively been marginalized. Instead, it came from Holland:”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The vast majority of hydrogenated oils consumed by Americans are made from soybeans, and this has been true since the 1960s”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The consumption of “sweets” in the Seven Countries study, as you might remember, correlated more closely with heart disease rates than did any other kind of food:”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“These apparent paradoxes would be vexing, except that an alternative explanation for the relative absence of heart disease on Crete had always been at hand: the near-complete absence of sugar in the Cretan diet. As Allbaugh described, the Cretans “do not serve desserts—except for fresh fruit in season. . . . Cake is seldom served, and pie almost never.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Not only did the selection of chicken as the dominant meat source have no basis in the history of the Mediterranean diet, but one could reasonably question whether chicken has the same effect on health as do Cretan goats or kids or lamb. Red meat, for example, has a far greater abundance of vitamins B12 and B6, as well as the nutrients selenium, thiamine, riboflavin, and iron, than does chicken.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Lifshitz found, and the worst vitamin deficiencies occurred on the lowest-fat diets, even when protein intake was adequate.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Vegetarian diets generally have not been shown to help people live longer.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ate three to four times more red meat than they do today.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Indeed, for the first 250 years of American history, even the poor in the United States could afford meat or fish for every meal. The fact that the workers had so much access to meat was precisely why observers regarded the diet of the New World to be superior to that of the Old.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Finally, there was the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a trial that enrolled 49,000 women in 1993 with the expectation that when the results came back, the benefits of a low-fat diet would be validated once and for all. But after a decade of eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains while cutting back on meat and fat, these women not only failed to lose weight, but they also did not see any significant reduction in their risk for either heart disease or cancer of any major kind. WHI was the largest and longest trial ever of the low-fat diet, and the results indicated that the diet had quite simply failed.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Giving up animal fats has also meant shifting over to vegetable oils, and over the past century the share of these oils has grown from zero to almost 8 percent of all calories consumed by Americans, by far the biggest change in our eating patterns during that time. In this period, the health of America has become strikingly worse. When the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet was first officially recommended to the public by the American Heart Association (AHA) in 1961, roughly one in seven adult Americans was obese. Forty years later, that number was one in three. (It’s heartbreaking to realize that the federal government’s “Healthy People” goal for 2010, a project begun in the mid-1990s, for instance, was simply to return the public back to levels of obesity seen in 1960, and even that goal was unreachable.)”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Since the 1970s, we have successfully increased our fruits and vegetables by 17 percent, our grains by 29 percent, and reduced the amount of fat we eat from 43 percent to 33 percent of calories or less. The share of those fats that are saturated has also declined, according to the government’s own data. (In these years, Americans also began exercising more.) Cutting back on fat has clearly meant eating more carbohydrates such as grains, rice, pasta, and fruit. A breakfast without eggs and bacon, for instance, is usually one of cereal or oatmeal; low-fat yogurt, a common breakfast choice, is higher in carbohydrates than the whole-fat version, because removing fat from foods nearly always requires adding carbohydrate-based “fat replacers” to make up for lost texture.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The promotion of carbohydrate-based foods, such as cereals, breads, crackers, and chips, was exactly the kind of dietary advice large food companies favored, since those were the products they sold. Recommending polyunsaturated oils over saturated fats also served them well because these oils were a major ingredient of their cookies and crackers and were the principal ingredient in their margarines and shortenings.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: why butter, meat, and cheese belong in a healthy diet