Book Review ~ Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz

Investigative journalist, Nina Teicholz has written a book extolling the virtues of dietary fat (and saturated fat) and perpetuating the lie that is Americans on a low fat diet.  She calls it The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

Don't waste your money.  Spread the word so others can save as well.

I'm not going to review this entire book because I cannot stomach reading it.  It is a poor follow-up to her friend and manuscript reviewer Gary Taubes' Good Calories Bad Calories ... and its what ... over 6 years late in the game??

In the Highlight reel:

• Teicholz claim Americans went from eating 43% fat to 33% fat.  Unreferenced assertion.  I.just.can't.
• We will now know Ancel Keys middle name is Benjamin.  As if referring to him by his full real name makes the demonizing better somehow -- like scolding a child.  Pathetic.   I will have much to say about Keys in the coming week as regards revisionist history by so-called investigative journalists.
• The Hunza survived primarily on animal foods.  
• The Masai "considered fruits and vegetables fit to be eaten only by cows" (otherwise known as women and children?)
• Lancet critics of lipid-heart hypothesis:  "statistical association must not be immediately equated with cause and effect."   Remember that folks ;-)
• Invokes the Shai study with:  "Remember that the Shai study in Israel found that the Mediterranean diet group, eating a high proportion of calories as these “complex” carbohydrates, turned out to be less healthy and fatter than the group on the Atkins diet."   I guess she doesn't read Eades' blog OR original journal articles, or she'd know that the Mediterranean diet group lost as much weight as the Atkins group, the women on Mediterranean diet lost the most weight of any subgroup, diabetics fared better on Mediterranean diet, and ... well ... 4 year followup and it looks like the Atkins dieters were the fatter bunch. 

THE WHOPPER

The Pima Indians of Arizona 

(and others)

Misrepresented ONCE AGAIN

I really just can't take this flagrant intellectual dishonesty any more.  Here are the direct quotes from the book:

Meanwhile, the Native Americans of the Southwest were observed between 1898 and 1905 by the physician-turned-anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, who wrote up his observations in a 460-page report for the Smithsonian Institute. The Native Americans he visited were eating a diet of predominantly meat, mainly from buffalo, yet, as Hrdlička observed, they seemed to be spectacularly healthy and lived to a ripe old age. The incidence of centenarians among these Native Americans was, according to the 1900 US Census, 224 per million men and 254 per million women, compared to only 3 and 6 per million among men and women in the white population. Although Hrdlička noted that these numbers were probably not wholly accurate, he wrote that “no error could account for the extreme disproportion of centenarians observed.” Among the elderly he met of age ninety and up, “not one of these was either much demented or helpless.”

Hrdlička was further struck by the complete absence of chronic disease among the entire Indian population he saw. “Malignant diseases,” he wrote, “if they exist at all— that they do would be difficult to doubt— must be extremely rare .” He was told of “tumors” and saw several cases of the fibroid variety, but never came across a clear case of any other kind of tumor, nor any cancer. Hrdlička wrote that he saw only three cases of heart disease among more than two thousand Native Americans examined, and “not one pronounced instance” of atherosclerosis (buildup of plaque in the arteries). Varicose veins were rare. Nor did he observe cases of appendicitis, peritonitis , ulcer of the stomach, nor any “grave disease” of the liver. Although we cannot assume that meat eating was responsible for their good health and long life, it would be logical to conclude that a dependence on meat in no way impaired good health.     {Kindle Locations 305-318}

I think Grain Brain Perlmutter ought to read her source and reconsider how grains are causing dementia.  Ditto Wheat Belly and his claims about girth.  

Folks, as it turns out -- THANK YOU GOOGLE -- Hrdlička's book is available in full for free.   Here are some links:  PDF from Medical Heritage Libraries, Google Play link (to read online or "buy" free and download) .  For anyone interested, here's Frank Russell's The Pima Indians. I found the Google ebook by searching on Hrdlicka Pima and buffalo, because this was a new one to me!  Even Taubes doesn't make such an outlandish claim as that Hrdlicka reported predominant meat consumption.   In his lectures he even mentions corn and wheat and fishing the Gila river.  Here is what it says in another Hrdlička piece:

Perhaps she meant Buffalo clams??  In any case, Teicholz doesn't specify the Pima in the book, despite dragging out Fat Louisa in her TEDxEast talk.  Still, I thought I'd give her the benefit of the doubt and that there must be some other Native Americans Hrdlička was talking about.  Here's the beauty of ebooks and Google's digitizing -- search feature (this does not appear to work on downloaded PDF).  So I searched on buffalo and there were four hits:  

• p.86 file/74 book, where water to wipe a baby's butt was brought in a buffalo horn
• p. 253 file/203 book, where an albino named White Buffalo is discussed
• p. 280 file/236 book, where woman treated her gonorrhea with an herbal concoction containing "buffalo eat ears"
• p. 453 file/420 book, where Buffalo appears in publishers address

I did, on the other hand, find copious references to legume, grain and fruit consumption.  The Appendix is particularly interesting.  Here is an excerpt on the Pima -- the legume-hating Paleos might want to pay particular attention along with Taubes and Teicholz.  

Sprinkled with water.  Eaten without further preparation.    Mesquite bean juice  --from crushed beans in cold water -- "makes them well" .  Between the Pima and the Masai, it's a wonder these two cultures survived all the plant-borne toxins to become the favorite poster children for fad diets and "science" fiction journalists.  

See?  No need for lengthy preparation apparently, and the grinding would count as HIIT vs. cardio so you're safe there.  Note that the water is consumed not discarded.   Screw-bean -- Proposis odorata or Propopis pubescens --I think that will make a good nickname for a diet book author (grin).   Then there's the seeds.

The gathering and prep sounds too much like cardio though.  But remind me ... the seeds of a grass ... I think we call that grain.  Teicholz, who hilariously cautions against the cholesterol havoc-wreaking properties of fruit in a Mashable interview, might do well to read this entire section and take note of the Mescal consumed more by other tribes, and the various and sundry cactus fruits and such they consumed.   I encourage everyone to read the full Appendix on this topic.  Throw in some freshwater fish (they tend to be quite low fat), clams and a wild deer here or there ....

I could end this here, but I would be remiss if I didn't share the hilarity that is Dr. Eades coming out of blog semi-retirement to review this book:

Some choice quotes interspersed with my commentary ...

I think it is one of the most important books on nutrition ever written. Maybe the most important.

You have GOT to be kidding me.  Even coming from Eades, I find this outrageous.

Second, this book is so brimming with valuable information that I was almost paralyzed in trying to figure out which parts to excerpt.

This book is more distinguished by what is not in it, rather than what is.

I can categorically tell you that there are not enough superlatives – at least not in my vocabulary – to adequately describe how wonderful and important this book is. But I’m going to try because I really believe it is that good.

As if your readers needed further evidence as to the value of our opinion on matters nutritional and scientific.   Make no mistake, this wasn't the usual review from a skimmer, he had a hand in shaping this manuscript!   Somehow he missed the image of pentane put forth as an example of what a fatty acid looks like I suppose.  Oh it's all a bit too much.  

image link, hat tip Seth at The Science of Nutrition

Eades throws in an appeal to his own intellectual authority reminding us of his "own research on Paleolithic man and his diet", upon which he bases his opinions that they ate mostly meat (nevermind what real anthropologists say) ... and then it comes ... the long excerpt of Teicholz' version of Hrdlička's findings.  The same one that I included above.  

Folks, this is beyond a mistake or even bias at this point.  This is journalistic malfeasance.  This would earn you an F if not get you thrown out of school in some places.  It's been a while since I've read Taubes' version, but I don't think he goes so far as to misrepresent the Pima diet entirely in his book ... he more skews it around refined carbohydrate and makes inferences in his lectures.  Teicholz one upped him with her take.  It's wrong.  But none of the manuscript reviewers caught it?  Because I guess Eades has never really researched the Pima first hand.  After marveling at the number of centenarians quoted in his excerpt, Eades smugly writes:

How did we go from a meat-eating, butter-slathering, lard-cooking society to the fat-fearful, heart attack prone, constantly dieting people of today? The blame for that can be laid directly at the doorstep of one man.

Ancel Benjamen Keys.

He's ABK now y'all, got it?!  Yeah, those Southwest Native Americans were really into that before Ancel came along .....   Give me a break already.  I'm flummoxed at how any investigative journalist who claims to have read thousands of journal articles and has a background in history left out Keys' seminal work -- hint: it was not the 6-7 Countries, and it wasn't even the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, though he deserves recognition for it.  But it's a good thing we know his middle name now.  And he was tall according to Shanahan.  Important stuff in nutrition science!

Ironically, Eades points out that a non-scientist wrote some final governmental report suggesting fat in the diet be cut.  OH THE IRONY, when Teicholz has ZERO background in the sciences (per twitter exchange, her "study" of biology at Yale and Stanford must have been a general course for non-majors as her degrees are apparently in history and politics).   He goes on.  I skipped to the end, where he writes:

I predict that within a few years, one of two things will have happened as a result of this important book.

Either Nina will be burned at the stake. Or we will all be eating our food cooked in lard, butter, beef tallow and duck fat, just as we ate it back in the days before Ancel Keys came on the scene. We’ll eat the way we ate when a case of heart disease was an anomaly.

As you can see, the narrative is in place.  Criticizing this book will be seen as ad hominem burning of the messenger at the stake.    I feel bad in a way after reading the Acknowledgement about how this book has consumed a decade of Teicholz' life.  But if that were truly the case, she should have done a MUCH more thorough and objective job in her research.  Perhaps had she included an objective reviewer during the writing process, she might have done just that.  But with Taubes and Eades  as reviewers (and I bet Taubes loved the fawning martyr schtick in her book!), along with Phinney and Westman, she didn't stand a chance.    Ronald Krauss also had a hand along the way.  Wonder what he said.

On that note.  I guess I'll write a review for Amazon soon.  It's looking interesting there already!!  Lots of 5-stars and 1-stars.  Guess what mine will be?  :-)