Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz

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Originally Posted by Liz53

I'm trying to figure out why you are so fundamentally opposed to this book, aj cohn…..is it the message or the messenger? And why such a strong reaction? Her advice for eating falls squarely within the Paleo/primal/ancestral health sphere. Do you have a problem with these ideas? Or it her presentation of it?

I'm not fundamentally opposed to this book; I'm fundamentally opposed to poor scholarship, fuzzy thinking and intellectual dishonesty, especially in published works. Both Dr.s Davis' and Perlmutter's books, for example, are classic examples books of citing studies that show only associations to support assertions of causality and even citing studies that show the opposite of what's asserted. Davis' book even devotes a full chapter to the debunked acid-alkaline hypothesis. Such books damage the efforts to critique the low-fat dogma and promote more traditional diets.

The one-star review I mentioned presents quite a persuasive case of plagiarism of Taubes rather than simple re-phrasing. The review and subsequent comments by the reviewer also present a persuasive case for Teicholz misrepresenting or torturing the conclusions of the studies she cites. Here's just one such example from the review:

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On page 11-12 Teicholz discusses the Masai tribe of Africa and how they consume quite a bit of milk daily yet have very low cholesterol (much like Taubes does in ch. 2 of GCBC). She also mentions that and are not fat they don't have high blood pressure. I don't know why she throws that the blood pressure and leanness in there since no one claims that milk causes high blood pressure, nor that these African tribes that walk about 30 miles per day and burn 300-500 kcals/hour would be fat because they drink milk. The real crime here is one of omission. In support of her argument that diets heavy in saturated fat won't lead to high cholesterol and atherosclerosis because the Masai do it, she cites an article published in the NEJM titled "Some Unique Biologic Characteristics of the Masai of East Africa." The entire point of that article was to claim that the reason that the Masai have such low cholesterol levels (and therefore atherosclerosis) despite a diet heavy in saturated fats was because they have a unique feedback mechanism that suppresses endogenous cholesterol synthesis that most of us don't have. Yet there of course is no mention of this in the text (or GCBC) because to suggest that their low cholesterol was due to genetics would hurt her meat-is-good-for-you narrative.

Even a single misuse of allegedly-supporting studies makes everything in a book suspect. If you find three such examples, you can throw away the entire book and reasonably say that proponents of certain POV are like mindless zealots.