The importance of dietary animal fat, told in a post in Ketopia, is well understood by nutritional biochemists. The refusal of the government-nutrition cabal to renounce its longstanding proscription against animal fat and, by association, red meat, has seriously compromised the health status of its trusting citizens. This untenable situation strengthens the meaning and potential of a remarkable book that has recently appeared on the literary scene.

This new book demands and deserves attention. It is The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. Nina’s story is told against an environment of decade-long efforts to waken to the American public to the epidemics of chronic inflammatory diseases caused by the official heart-healthy diet designed by their own government that are slowly killing them and their loved ones.

Why has this awakening failed to occur? It held such promise when Gary Taubes opened eyes with revelations of governmental, institutional, and academic fraud in Good Calories, Bad Calories (GCBC) in 2007. It seemed certain that truth would prevail. The publication of occasional stories that dietary fats might not really be as detrimental as painted began to appear in the secondary media. But the medical and nutrition establishments remained firm in their proscription against dietary fat, with escalated advertising of frightening pseudoscience that impugned animal fat and red meat. Within a few years, the hope that the public would insist on change faded and disappeared.

Why does the public seem as distrustful of dietary fat today as ever? Taubes himself may have suggested an answer. In an article written in 2002(1), Taubes alluded to the near impossibility of an untruth cemented in the public mind by decades of repetition being replaced by a truth. Gary wrote:

…I can look down at my eggs and sausage and still imagine the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet begun to describe.

This highly skilled and knowledgeable investigative journalist had thoroughly studied the subject of GCBC and had personally benefited from following a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet. If Taubes could not free himself of a lingering fear of fat, how could lay-members of the general public do otherwise? The general public is unwittingly brain-washed.

Today we are blessed, in the form of The Big Fat Surprise (TBFS), with another chance to right the egregious wrongs created by the government’s pseudoscience aka The Food Guide Pyramid. TBFS is a truly remarkable and persuasive book in that it is extremely well written, fully accurate in fact, and sincerely heartfelt in approach. Sentiments most often expressed in comments by readers are: I could not put it down; Saturated fats are back in our diet; I am outraged that our government would be so devious. Testimony to the reader appeal of TBFS is the fact that it made the NYT Best Seller list less than two weeks after publication.

Nina’s tale presents two stories. One describes how the transgression came to be. It entails a half century-long flagrant fraud and deception conducted by agencies, institutions, and even a few respected officials charged with setting official nutrition policy. These disclosures offer a great potential for TBFS to have a significant impact on the public’s sense of right and wrong.

The second story tells the truth about dietary fat. Data on the actual benefits of dietary fats, including the much maligned saturated ones, are essential to correct a wrong done to the health of the public by the government-sponsored heart-healthy diet.

Depending on the response of the public to TBFS, there either will be no change in the status quo – or there will be adjustments in public nutrition policy that will ultimately foster major changes in the medical treatment of chronic nutritional diseases, including cancer. It is now known that essentially all chronic diseases once thought to be the accompaniments of old age are based on chronic inflammation; chronic inflammation is known to be primarily the result of improper nutrition.(2) Nutrients will replace drugs.

The public MUST NOT let TBFS slip slowly into oblivion. Nina’s first story should create an outraged public that demands the following:

  1. Government-sponsored nutrition must be totally terminated.
  2. Freedom of information in valid nutritional sciences must be made widely available.
  3. All citizens must have the right to design their own nutrition plans.
  4. A primary prevention program based on eliminating the causes of diseases must be implemented.

Nina’s second story, the truth about dietary fats, will be more difficult to correct. Brain-washed people are hostages of their beliefs and difficult to persuade otherwise. An appeal to the following logic may be helpful in some cases.

It is generally accepted that the nutritional requirements of the first humans were the products of millions of years of evolution that brought them to the human state. It is also generally accepted that today’s humans have the same nutritional requirements as their prehistoric predecessors because of the inestimable length of time required for detectable genetic change to occur.

All readers who fear fat should consider the following:

  1. A chicken egg contains the total number and kind of nutrients required to make a viable chick. The egg contains 76 percent moisture, 13 percent protein, 9 percent saturated and unsaturated fatty acids, and less than 2 percent non-fat lipids and glucose (combined with either protein or lipid), and 0 carbohydrates. If evolution devised a high-fat, no-carbohydrate recipe for making a live chick, could such a recipe be harmful to humans?
  2. Mother’s milk, which is capable of complete nurturing of a newborn for a period of months, contains 87 percent water, 4 percent fats (saturated an unsaturated), and 9 percent non-fat solids. The latter is approximately half protein and half lactose. The fat component contains the whole set of saturated fats from C4 through C18. C4 is known as butyric acid; it is the fatty acid that gives butter its name.

People who fear fat should ponder the following: Butyric acid is an important energy source for the lower section of the small intestine. The ONLY human food source of butyric acid is milk fat. Have you had your butyric acid today?

Resources

  1. Taubes, G. What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? New York Times; July 07, 2002.
  2. Ottoboni A, Ottoboni F. The Modern Nutritional Diseases and How to Prevent Them, Second Edition. Fernley, NV: Vincente Books, 2013.