Nina Teicholz is a New York Times bestselling investigative science journalist who has played a pivotal role in challenging the conventional wisdom on dietary fat. Her groundbreaking work, 'The Big Fat Surprise', which The Economist named as the #1 science book of 2014, has led to a profound rethinking on whether we have been wrong to think that fat, including saturated fat, causes disease.

Nina continues to explore the political, institutional, and industry forces that prevent better thinking on issues related to nutrition and science. She has been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the British Medical Journal, Gourmet, the Los Angeles Times and many other outlets.

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

Featuring Nina Teicholz, Author, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet; director of the Nutrition Coalition; adjunct professor, New York University Wagner School of Public Policy; moderated by Terence Kealey, Visiting Senior Fellow, Cato Institute; author, Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing.

Nina Teicholz is the investigative journalist who, in her book The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, overturned 40 years of official dietary advice and showed that meat, cheese, and butter are nutritious and need not be avoided.

At this event, Ms. Teicholz will tell of her discovery of the systematic distortion of dietary advice by expert scientists, government and big business to the detriment of the health of Americans. She will chronicle the succession of unfortunate discoveries she made, and she will describe how the Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit, bipartisan group which she founded and directs, works to educate policy makers about the need for reform of nutrition policy so that it is evidence-based.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans influence the food we eat, yet they aren’t based on high-quality science. That’s why cinnamon rolls, chocolate milk, and pizza are “approved” foods in our schools and on our military bases.

Nina Teicholz, award-winning journalist and founder of The Nutrition Coalition, aims to change that. Through her advocacy work and investigative writing, she promotes the need for applying more rigorous science to the guidelines process. 

While many challenges remain, Nina helps us identify the changes that need to be made and what we can do to enact them.

Few people in this world have done more to unearth the fallacy and shoddy evidence behind our dietary guidelines than Nina Teicholz. Her book The Big Fat Surprise is one of the seminal books opening our eyes to the problems the dietary guidelines have caused and their complete lack of quality evidence. 

But Nina didn't stop there. As director of the Nutrition Coalition, Nina is spearheading the effort to make sure nutritional recommendations are based on quality science or aren't made at all. On the surface it makes sense that we would all agree on that. Yet there is no shortage of controversy and deception still happening and the 2020 guidelines committee may not help matters much. Hear Nina's perspective on this, plus some the advances we have made, and where we can find hope for the future.

Today’s Empowering Neurologist interview is with Nina Teicholz. Nina Teicholz is an investigative journalist and author of the International (and New York Times) bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise, and this groundbreaking book is what we’re discussing today. The Economist named it the #1 science book of 2014, and it was also named a 2014 Best Book by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Mother Jones, and Library Journal.

The Big Fat Surprise has upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat and challenged the very core of our nutrition policy. A review of the book in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition read, “This book should be read by every nutritional science professional.” A former editor of the British Medical Journal said, “Teicholz has done a remarkable job in analyzing [the] weak science, strong personalities, vested interests, and political expediency” of nutrition science.

Before taking a deep dive into researching nutrition science for nearly a decade, Teicholz was a reporter for National Public Radio and also contributed to many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Economist. She attended Yale and Stanford where she studied biology and majored in American Studies. She has a master’s degree from Oxford University and served as associate director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

What underlies the war on fat? It’s big business, wanting us all to eat more refined carbs and sugar to replace the fat calories that we’ve been instructed to reduce. And I can think of no one who has done more to open our eyes to this ongoing travesty than Nina Teicholz. Here’s more about her from her website:

Nina Teicholz is an investigative science journalist and leader in nutrition reporting who is challenging the conventional wisdom on dietary fat–particularly, whether saturated fat causes heart disease and whether fat really makes you fat. The New York Times bestselling author of The Big Fat Surprise. Teicholz also serves as Executive Director of The Nutrition Coalition, an independent non-profit group that promotes evidence-based nutrition policy. She is one of a new generation of researchers arguing that diets lower in carbohydrates are a scientifically sound approach for reversing nutrition-related diseases.

For more than half a century, we’ve been told to eat a diet high in grains, low in fat, saturated fat (and cholesterol), but the last two decades of research have led a growing number of scientists  to conclude that this diet, despite being rigorously tested, could never be shown to prevent any kind of disease.

Teicholz’s work also explains why this diet has remained official policy for so long: the roles played by crusading scientists, the food industry, and more.

The story is as much about politics as it is about science, and Nina Teicholz’s research ultimately confirms that the traditional foods we were told to abandon (meat, cheese, eggs, butter) are safe, and even good for health.

Nina Teicholz has been called “The Rachel Carson of the nutrition movement.” Her book has been called a “must read” by some of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, including The Lancet, The BMJ, and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In speaking about Nina, the immediate past-president of the World Heart Federation, said at the Davos Cardiology Update Davos (2017) “She shook up the nutrition world, but she was right.”

Please enjoy this compelling interview with one of my personal heroes.

The story this week on the podcast is as much about politics as it is about science. In my conversation with Nina Teicholz, a leading science journalist, we explore saturated fats, modern nutrition policy, and flawed research on our way to some startling conclusions. Join us.