By Michael R. Eades, M.D.
13 May 2014
This review of The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz is the most difficult and demanding I have ever written. It is demanding for a couple of reasons.
First, it is psychologically demanding on me because I want to write a review so good it inspires everyone to buy the book immediately and read it. Why? Because I think it is one of the most important books on nutrition ever written. Maybe the most important. And I feel a responsibility to inspire as many people as I can to get their hands on it.
Second, this book is so brimming with valuable information that I was almost paralyzed in trying to figure out which parts to excerpt. A book review always comes with excerpts, and this book presented me with such a bounty of choices, it took me forever to decide which to use.
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.
I met Nina Teicholz five or six years ago when I was in New York. She told me she had converted from a low-fat to a low-carb diet and that she was writing a book. We really didn’t discuss the book she was writing, so I was clueless. We kept in sporadic touch via email and exchanged a scientific paper or two, but that was about it. I hadn’t heard from her in a couple of years when last September out of the blue I got an email from her saying the first draft of her book was finished. She asked if I would mind reading it and giving her feedback.
I hate these requests because it is really time consuming to read an entire manuscript. And if it sucks, what do you say? I’ve written a number of books in my time, and I know how much effort goes into writing one. Even a bad one. So I hate to be put in the position of having to say to someone, Your book is a loser.
But, Nina’s request came when I was traveling and had some airplane time on my hands, so I said, Sure, send it on.
What she sent was a number of files, some in Word, some pdf. And she didn’t send the entire book, just the first half of it.
I started to read and was absolutely riveted. Instead of trying to carve out time to read her manuscript, I started carving out time from reading her book to do all the other things I needed to do. It was that good.
As I was approaching the end of the part she sent, I emailed asking for the rest. Which she sent, and which I voraciously devoured.
I made a few suggestions – a very few – and we emailed back and forth a bit. Then a few months later, her publisher sent me a bound review copy of basically the printout of her manuscript. It wasn’t typeset as most galleys are. I read this version and made copious notes. Here are what a typical couple of pages in my copy looks like. You can now see why it was difficult for me to decide what small parts to excerpt.
Since then, I’ve received the actual typeset galleys, which I have also read. So, I’ve gone through this book three times. All I’m asking is for you to go through it once. I guarantee you will thank me for pushing it on you.
Nina Teicholz is a married mother of two living in New York City. She is an investigative journalist and food writer by trade. When she first moved to New York, she was following a low-fat, USDA Food Pyramid style diet. Her life changed when she began writing restaurant reviews. She ate whatever the chefs she was reviewing sent out, which was often “paté, beef of every cut prepared in every imaginable way, cream sauces, cream soups, foie gras – all the foods [she] had avoided [her] entire life.”
She ate an enormous amount of fatty food, and despite her worries to the contrary, her cholesterol numbers didn’t go through the roof. But best of all, she lost the ten pounds she had been struggling to shed.
Read the rest of the review by clicking on the link below:
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