In the book, The Big Fat Surprise , released in 2014 and quickly become a publishing case, journalist Nina Teicholz claims that everything we know about diets is wrong.

To lose weight we must eat foods that contain a lot of fat and exclude or almost all foods that contain carbohydrates. According to Teicholz, the secret to losing weight is not a fat-free diet, but a diet with fat.
The subtitle of the book in fact mentions: Why butter, meat and cheese should be part of a healthy diet. 

Especially women, who eliminate all fatty foods from their diet, are wrong using this approach, with the result that year after year they struggle with the extra pounds. They should learn from men, explains the journalist, that in general they don’t care about fats, and they eat, paradoxically, in a healthier way and more just to lose weight.

Is he wrong or is he right?
In this article we will try to figure it out.

BURN FAT BY EATING
FAT THE BIG FAT SURPRISE

First of all, Teicholz is not a dietician, but a journalist.
However, for nine years she went through all the research in the dietary and nutritional fields to get to write that a diet based on fat would help you lose weight and stay healthy.
But which fats? The saturated ones.

So yes to meat, butter, cheese, eggs.
No to oils of any kind, oil seeds, avocados, nuts, margarine and so on. For 60 years, explains the reporter, we have believed that saturated fats were responsible for cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, overweight. But there is no scientific evidence on this. It was the universities of Harvard, Cambridge and Berkeley that proved this with their recent studies.
This, it must be said for the record, is true.
That is, it is true that in recent years rigorous studies have come out on large samples of participants (in one case it reaches one million) that deny the link between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease.

Vegetable oils, invented for mass consumption since 1900, are, on the other hand, highly unstable.
Here too the journalist is right. Chemically, saturated fats tend to oxidise less: mono and polyunsaturated fats, having more chains, tend to go rancid or unstable, therefore to develop free radicals, in conditions such as excessive heat, light or even over time.
Since the last century, everyone has been frying in seed oils. 90% of the products on supermarket shelves contain them. This is also true.

What, on the other hand, is rather fallacious in the book?

1. First of all, the fact of considering all carbohydrates the same.

   We cannot equate the fructose contained in fruit with the corn syrup of candies or snacks or drinks. Because fructose is present in smaller quantities in fruit, together with glucose, vitamins, mineral salts, fiber and water and many antioxidants.
   Teicholz states: ” We now know that a diet with too many carbohydrates is not so healthy ,” putting vegetables and fruit on the same level with pasta, bread, pizza, biscuits.

2. Second, the reporter says that the ideal diet consists of 50-70% of fats, 30-20% of proteins and 20/10% of carbohydrates.

   Yet the longest-lived populations in the world all eat high amounts of carbohydrates. Okinawans eat 70% like Kitawans. Same thing for the Hazdas. A lot of calories, but above all from roots, tubers, legumes and fruit.

3. The third fallacy is that which concerns women

   The reporter explains that if women gain more weight than men it is because they eat less fat. And not because they have a lower percentage of lean mass, therefore a slower metabolism, but because they eat less fat. It is known that men and women are the same.

Yes, but the sources? Where does Teicholz get the scientific evidence that, like her colleague Taubes, should make us infer that the advice of nutritionists are and were hoaxes? Nowhere, but misunderstanding some data: as demonstrated here . So much so that 180 scientists from all over the world protested, writing that their research data had been misunderstood and exploited.