Why The American Dietary Guidelines Are Making Us Fatter and Sicker Than Ever With Nina Teicholz

The U.S. dietary guidelines are considered the “gold standard” of nutrition recommendations. But they are failing us. Americans are unhealthier (and more obese) than ever before. Nina Teicholz, the author of “The Big Fat Surprise”, explains why they are faulty and based on poor science.

She goes over how the guidelines were chosen, its ties to the American Heart Association, Proctor & Gamble and Crisco. She explains why the emphasis on grains (even refined grains) and low-fat choices have led to sickness. And why saturated fat and sodium consumption are currently “capped” but shouldn’t be. Finally, she shares her vision for how the guidelines could be reformed, based on sound science, for improved health outcomes for all Americans.

Visit Nina’s websites: ninateicholz.com and nutritioncoalition.us

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Nina Teicholz.

The first US Dietary Guidelines were established in 1980 with a food pyramid that had at its base a recommendation for some 8 to 11 servings of grains. Americans since then have dutifully followed these dietary guidelines to their detriment. It has unfortunately led us farther and farther away from real health. This is episode 521 and our guest is Nina Teicholz. Nina is a New York Times bestselling author and a New York-based science journalist who is committed to advocating for overhauling these dietary guidelines.

Nina has also formed the Nutrition Coalition that is a non-profit working to ensure that nutrition policy accurately reflects the best and most current scientific evidence. We explore Nina’s insights on how and why are dietary guidelines are doing us a disservice. She goes over how true science does not back the guidelines, particularly with the caps on sodium and saturated fat, for example. She also explains what reforms she would advocate for and, in fact, is advocating for and why these guidelines aren’t serving us well.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to follow the Wise Traditions Show on the platform of your choice. This way, you won’t miss a thing or better yet, download our Wise Traditions Show app on your iPhone or Android device. Put Wise Traditions on the search bar and we’ll pop up. Download it for free and listen to your heart’s content. Thank you so much for being a faithful audience, however, you’re getting this content. We appreciate you.

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Welcome to the show, Nina.

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Where Are The Dietary Guidelines Today

This is a phenomenal moment in history. The fact that nutrition and health are part of the national conversation, I find fascinating. I’m also excited to know that you are going to be having a hand perhaps in the shaping of the new dietary guidelines. Before we get into all that, tell me where are the guidelines now? Are we still on the food pyramid or are we with MyPlate? I’m a little confused.

The guidelines which is our nation’s most influential nutrition policy. I would say it’s the key lever on what Americans think is healthy to eat in America and I say that because the guidelines are downloaded to all health practitioners, doctors, nurses, nutritionists, and dietitians as virtually the gold standard. Many doctors in large practices cannot go outside of the guidelines because they are considered the gold standard.

They are also drive all the federal feeding assistance programs, so school lunches, feeding programs to the elderly, women and infant children, what we used to call food baskets. Even food for the military, which has an obesity problem equal to the general population. One in four Americans eat one of those meals every week. They are hugely influential. They also drive K-12 education on nutrition. I got interested in them for that reason when I realized that they were just the North Star on nutrition in America.

They were launched in 1980. It came out of a senate select commission that decided to look at the then rising tide of chronic disease in America, heart disease, and also cancer. This was in the late 1970s. By 1980, they had made an official policy housed. Its jointly issued by the US Department of Agriculture and Health and Human Services. When they started, they didn’t know what to exactly recommend to Americans. They literally started by recommending everyone eat ten slices of bread every day. In general, this was a policy that had been adopted from the American Heart Association. It was reduced in saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, and in total fat. That is largely what we still have now.

I just wanted to go back to the ten slices of bread. I remember that pyramid and at the bottom, it did say 8 to 11 servings of grain per day. Now, you said that was shaped in part by the American Heart Association, but I thought it was also shaped in part by our AG policy. In other words, we had a surplus of grain, so they thought, “Let’s just stick that in there.” They weren’t looking at Health necessary as the only factor for shaping the pyramid.

Wise Traditions | Nina Teicholz | Guidelines — Guidelines: The American Heart Association told Americans to cut back on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol to prevent heart disease. That’s the beginning of nationwide policies telling people to reduce animal foods.

That’s one of the theories that is out there. I have not investigated it, nor seen direct evidence that occurred according to my reading of what went on in that Senate select committee. The people who were involved was senior scientists from the American Heart Association who were very influential in that policy. The National Institutes of Health had always been very close to the American Heart Association.

Going back to 1948, they had intertwining directorates. They operated almost as a single entity. The American Heart Association, in my view, has had the greatest impact on those dietary guidelines. The American Heart Association going back to 1961, had told Americans to cut back on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol to prevent heart disease. That’s the beginning of all the policies nationwide telling us to basically reduce animal foods, increased grains, and other plant foods for optimal health.

How has that served us, Nina?

Not well. In 1960, obesity in America was at 9.6% of adults. I won’t say now, but as of 2014, which is the latest government number. They have not updated it. It was almost 43%. Imagine what it is now with the lockdowns and COVID. It is easily at around 50% and I’m not talking about obesity and overweight, which is easily over two thirds of American adults. I’m just saying this is just obesity. What you can say and we can talk about why, but the guidelines have clearly failed to prevent any chronic disease or protect health in America in addition to rapidly rising obesity, which by the way, was quite low as I just described.

When the dietary guidelines are introduced in 1980, it takes a sharp immediate upward turn the rate of obesity and has continued on upwards virtually ever since. Also, as we know, rates of type-2 diabetes and all diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome, polycystic ovary syndrome and heart disease is still the number one killer in America. Cancer rates have gone up. Virtually, every diet related disease has continued to go up. According to an estimate years ago, 88% of American adults had one or more chronic disease. It’s an appalling picture.

How Americans Adhere And Respond To The Dietary Guidelines

It’s shocking. You do believe, though, that this gold standard is to blame in part because people have been following this. I wanted to ask you that. How strictly do Americans even listen to these dietary guidelines?

That is a common argument that I hear, which is, we have the guidelines but nobody follows them. I have two charts on the homepage of my non-profit called the Nutrition Coalition which can be found at NutritionCoalition.us. Showing according to the best government data, Americans between 1970 and 2014, in every category of food measured by the government, we have followed the guidelines. Fruits and vegetables are up by 20% to 35%. Whole grains are up. Refined grains are down. Red meat is down by 28%. Beef is down with 35%. Whole milk is down by 79%. Butters down by around 18%. Eggs are down by a similar amount. Fish and shellfish are up.

There’s not a single category measured by the government where we have not followed the guidelines to a T. By the way, vegetable oils or seed oils are up 89% by some estimates to be close to 20% of all calories we consume now. That argument does not compute. In addition, there’s a paper on macronutrients from 1960 to 2000. I forget the end date, but it’s since 1960. Carbohydrates are up 30%. That’s all grain, starches, and sugars. Fat is down by 20% as a percentage of total calories. No matter what way you cut the data, we have followed those guidelines.

Certainly, this data must be setting off alarm bells in the government and perhaps this is why they revised the pyramid into MyPlate? Didn’t they do that? What year was that? What were the results of that experiment?

The pyramid came out in 1990 and as you said, that big bottom slab was all greens. It was 8 to 11 servings of grains a day when it started. That was revised downward down to 6 to 11 great servings of grains per day. It includes three servings of refined grains, which is crazy. We can talk about why that’s there. It includes five and a half teaspoons of soybean oil every day and up to 10% of calories of sugar. At some point when the food pyramid was losing cache, and it may have been 2015 or around there. They switched to MyPlate, which is this useless, in my opinion. It’s kindergarten like graphic, which shows a plate with four brightly colored sections.

If you can imagine it, it used to be the plate in the late 1950s, half of it. A quarter was dairy, meat, fruits, vegetables, and grains. Half of the plate was animal foods. That has now been reduced to a quarter of the plate. Those proteins are no longer just from animals but also from peas, beans, lentils seeds, nuts, and soy. That whole category has been shrunk and diluted. Half the plate is fruits and vegetables, and still a quarter are grains.

Replication is the hallmark of good science.

Plant foods have taken over now. three quarters of the pyramid and proteins have been confined to a quarter of it. There are so many things that are confusing and wrong about the guidelines. I’ll give you a couple examples. One is that in 2015, the expert committee for the guidelines decided that there was no reason to have a cap on dietary cholesterol anymore. That means not eating shellfish or avoiding the egg yolks world, where all the nutrition is, which we did for so long.

They eliminated the numeric cap on cholesterol and yet they say that their formal dietary patterns are “lower in cholesterol.” That is confusing contradictory. People don’t understand that there’s no evidence for that. On the low-fat diet, once results came out from something called the Women’s Health Initiative, which was the largest nutrition trial ever undertaken on some 49,000 women lasting eight years and showing in 2006 no results and no benefit for preventing heart disease and any cancer. They measured 4 or 5 different kinds type-2 diabetes.

At the end of all that time, the women on the dietary guidelines diet weighed 2 pounds less than the control group. After eight years of dieting, imagine how dispiriting that is. After the results came out, the dietary guidelines dropped the low-fat language, but all of its modeling on all of its dietary patterns remain low in fat according to the scientific definition of that. It’s between 31% and 33% of the calories are fat, which is a low-fat diet.

How The Reformed Dietary Guidelines Still Fail Us

They’ve moved things around, but there’s still emphasizing a low-fat diet, more grains, plants, and vegetables than ever before, very little saturated fat, and fewer sources of animal protein. It’s still a disservice to us. You said it’s failing us.

There has been a need for reform of the guidelines for decades. My group had been the only one sounding the alarm about this for a decade, and we’ve helped raise the consciousness about the problems in the guidelines. We did a lot of work to try to establish that they need reform. We got congress to allocate ultimately $2 million to get reports from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Those reports came out with eleven recommendations on how to improve the transparency of the guidelines. There’s no disclosure of conflicts of interest or how the expert committee is chosen. Also, to improve the rigor of the systematic reviews because they don’t follow any recognized or validated methodology. For the scientists out there, for instance. They do not prioritize clinical trials over observational or epidemiological data even though that observational data is so weak and just generate hypotheses. Only clinical trials can reliably show cause and effect but they treat them all the same, or they’ll discount the clinical trial results and elevate the epidemiology. Consistently, they do this.

The USDA did not fully adopt any of those eleven recommendations. There was a paper out that my group funded by a team of top methodologists from around the world that did a peer review of the guidelines and looked at eight of the most important systematic reviews on the dietary patterns from the 2020 guidelines and found that they were of critically low quality and also subpar. It had all kinds of problems and shortcomings.

The least of which was when they tried to repeat the literature search, where you go out and look for all the papers on a topic. They found three times more papers than the expert committee had found. Imagine trying to replicate that review. You’ve got three times more ingredients to make a recipe. There’s no way you could replicate that. Replication is the hallmark of good science. We have a lot of evidence to show that these guidelines are not good science. We have enough evidence, especially that National Academies’ report or their several reports to start reform now. We don’t have to pause and assess. We have done that.

We should move forward and create reform. There’s a lot of things that need to change, the cap on saturated fat, as you mentioned and the 10% of calories is saturated fat. That is like a rate limiting factor on animal foods, how much and what meat and dairy you can eat. That’s why we don’t have whole milk and schools. That’s why people in part think red meat is bad for health.

That needs to change and it’s based on such outdated science. Another part of the story which is sad and depressing to me, the science exists. It’s just that these successive committees refuse to acknowledge it. They either actively suppress it as in the case with the low carb diet where they actively suppressed it, or they won’t accept it and won’t recognize it.

Why, Nina?

That’s a complicated question. I can only speculate. There’s bureaucratic inertia and office of about 35 people at USDA that run the guidelines and most of them have been there 25 or 30 years. They’re just real career believers. There’s the inertia and cognitive dissonance. There’s a whole line of industry and ideological interests lined up behind these guidelines. You have many experts who do not want to be wrong and have to reverse their advice, including the American Heart Association. This has been our dominant paradigm for so long. There’s a lot of natural resistance to change.

Why Refined Grains Are Included In The Guidelines

I want to talk to you about the change that’s coming and that you’re a catalyst for. Before we get there, I want to go back to a little something you said a moment ago. You were talking about the issue with why refined grains are included in the recommendations. You said, “I can get into that.” Please do. Tell me what’s up with that? Why would refine grains be included as part of a dietary guideline?

It’s such a good question. In this most expert committee meetings which I watched painfully, when they got to the refined grains recommendation, one of the committee members piped up and said, “Why are we doing this?” The chair of the committee answered, something I’ve known for a long time, which is that, “Only refined grains are enriched and fortified.” They’re fortified with Iron, B vitamins, and folate, I think. Anyway, if you do not have refined grains, the dietary guidelines will not meet its nutritional targets for vitamins and minerals and it already does not.

Even if you follow the dietary guidelines perfectly to a T, 100%, you will not meet your goals for potassium, magnesium, vitamin D, and maybe choline. That is also on the homepage of NutritionCoalition.us. You can go and look at that there. It’s crazy. One of the rules of the guidelines seems to me, should be it should deliver basic nutrition and understand that some of these nutritional targets are bare minimums like the proteins standard is an absolute bare minimum not to starve to death for bare survival. We know that you need more.

It’s 0.8 grams per kilograms of ideal body weight, but there’s a lot of literature to show that what we need is 1.2 to 1.6. That would be almost twice as much grams per kilogram of body weight for optimal health, growth, muscle metabolism, development, and healthy reproduction. You do need more protein and you need those proteins to ideally come from animal sources because they are complete and, therefore, more bioavailable. You can use them. I’m saying even if you follow the guidelines perfectly, you are still at a deficit. Those are not standards for good health.

The Change Nina Wants To Make

It’s a powerful line. Even if we follow the guidelines perfectly, we’re still at a deficit. That’s important for people to recognize. I was going to say, the thing is, many people are listening as you’ve said. Tell us now where you’re headed. What change do you want to make? You want to include more protein and more saturated fats to make all of these nutrient’s macro and micro more bioavailable. What influence do you have?

I don’t know where this stands, so I can’t say that much. The candidate to direct the dietary guidelines at USDA and that Kansas City was put forward by, I would say, the important teams were involved in this process. That is still being considered and I am in touch with officials at USDA, but here’s what I would do. First of all, the guidelines need to be based on an internationally recognized systematic review methodology, so that they’re credible and trustworthy.

Secondly, that they be designed to meet all nutrition goals, all minerals and all vitamins. Those would be my basic framework for all guidelines going forward. With these specific recommendations, that cap on saturated fat has to be revisited. The data on sodium has been exclusively on middle-aged hypertensive men. There’s no data on children or virtually any other group. Yet, it’s a rule that is applied to all and the sodium cap is set at a level that has been shown in multiple large studies to increase the risk of heart disease.

There’s a moderate amount of sodium that is ideal. If you go too high, your risk of heart disease increases. If you go too low, your risk increases. There’s a J-shape curve. That has been quite well established. Our sodium cap, especially for children, zero data on children. It needs to be revisited. I would say the protein category, as we’ve discussed, needs to be strengthened and probably the level needs to be increased.

The other urgent thing that needs to happen is there needs to be a dietary pattern for people with metabolic diseases, so obesity and type-2 diabetes. All these diseases. Once you have tipped over into metabolic ill health, you can no longer eat the same diet that a nineteen-year-old boy on a football team can eat. That’s because you have developed something called insulin resistance, which I believe is the root cause of all chronic diseases.

Insulin resistance means you can no longer tolerate as many carbohydrates in your diet as you used to. That’s why there is enormous body of literature showing that if you reduce carbohydrates, sugars and starches. Starches are just sugar molecules holding hands and high sugar fruits. If you reduce those excessive carbohydrates, you can reverse type-2 diabetes often just within weeks. You can sustainably lose weight because hunger is not part of this diet because protein and fat are more satiating. Reversing hypertension and the vast majority of heart disease risk factors. It’s been shown to reverse non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and polycystic ovary syndrome.

There must be a dietary pattern for people with metabolic diseases since they can no longer eat the same diet a 19-year-old boy on a football team can eat.

It is the way of eating that has shown the best evidence for reversing disease. According to Secretary Kennedy, that’s what Trump wants us to do, is to reverse disease with measurable results within two years. The only way you can get there is by having a low carbohydrate or ketogenic diet for people with those diseases that is offered by our government.

Nina’s Alternative Dietary Pyramid

I’ve seen somewhere an alternative pyramid that you designed based on what you just shared. Is that right?

Yes. We just came out with a paper. There are eighteen authors on the paper and I’m the lead author. It is called Myths and Facts, or Facts and Myths about low carbohydrate diets. It addresses all people’s concerns about the diet, does it have side effects? Is it affordable? Is it sustainable? All the common concerns that people have and commonly see about this diet. Does it cause her disease? Should I worry about my LDL cholesterol?

We address all of those issues and as part of that paper, we have this new pyramid, which is the first ever peer reviewed low carbohydrate and ketogenic pyramid. I didn’t realize it until I started working on it that it’s so needed. When I go out on the internets, look and google those pyramids, there is so much bad information out there like bananas and the bottom of the pyramid with pineapples. I couldn’t believe what the interpretations are. This is a peer-reviewed pyramid. People have seemed to have responded to it well.

Why Saturated Fat Is Preferable Over Seed Oils

I can understand why because there is a resurgence in the interest of American people, nutrition, and good health. This is why I think this is going to resonate. All of this aligns with Wise Traditions. We have eleven dietary principles that we point to base on the work of Dr. Price and some additional research the foundation has done. It very much aligns with what you’re saying. we’ve included salt. Salt is what was prized by traditional peoples. We include animal foods and fats, which reminds me there is this wave, as we’re discussing of interest in these things.

A lot of people are getting clued into the fact that seed oils are bad for you. it’s formally called vegetable oils, but now we know there’s hardly a vegetable to be seen of where these oils are extruded from. Tell us a little bit of your understanding about why saturated fat is preferable over seed oils and why you would take off the cap on saturated fat.

Going back to that 1961 American Heart Association declaration, that was the first time we were told reduce saturated fats. Instead, replace them with what they called polyunsaturated vegetable oils. The research in my book was the original research showing, the first research to show that these oils used to be used as machine lubricant. How did they come into the food supply via Crisco in 1911? How did they grow through various campaigns? Why did they grow so much in the US food supply? Part of that was this tremendous boost they got from American Heart Association because now they were seen as a medical product.

In my book, I have a reprint of an old adage showing Wesson oil ad saying, “Take this oil to your doctor,” like a prescription pad. I also reveal the incredible story about how Procter and Gamble basically launched the American Heart Association back in 1948 by donating the equivalent of now $20 million to the association, which was a tiny sleepy organization. Heart disease was relatively new and rare in 1948 and comes in Procter and Gamble. It gives it a ton of money and then according to the American Heart association’s own official history, they were transformed overnight as the money, floated into their coffers and became the national powerhouse that they are now.

Later on, there’s a letter I have of one of the American Heart Association expert scientists accusing the president of the American Heart Association saying, “I can’t believe you’re posing with a bottle of Crisco oil in the promotional video. You look like an advertisement.” To this day or until recently, the last time I looked, the Heart Association was still taking money from seed oil manufacturers but they began this boost.

Why are those oils potentially harmful? I’m going to explain two things. One is that there were all these clinical trials in the 1960s and ‘70s on altogether 76,000 people. A huge number of people tested all over the world on the idea that if you reduce saturated fats and replace it with these unsaturated fats. All these clinical trials, half the people would get about 18% of their calories as saturated fat. That’s what it used to be, so regular meat, regular fairy and regular cheese.

The other group gets soy filled burgers, soy filled milk, and imitation ice cream and what we would consider vegan versions. In all those clinical trials, first of all, there was no effect on heart disease mortality or total mortality, meaning switching to the seed oil diet did not spare you heart disease or the most unequivocal result is that you diet the same regardless of which diet you were on. Although, in one of the trials which with data that was found much later, this trial called the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, later found data showing that the more you lower your cholesterol, the more likely you were to die from heart disease by a pretty astonishing amount.

The more you lower your cholesterol, the more likely you are to die from heart disease.

One of the findings of all these trials that has not been well known and it’s only in my book. In six of them, including three by the National Institutes of Health, the people on the seed oils diet died at higher rates from cancer. That was a persistent finding. It led to high level meetings at NIH throughout the 1980s where the top scientists got together and said, “What is going on with seed oils and cancer deaths?” More generally, with lower cholesterol. There’s quite a bit of data beyond seed oils to show that lower cholesterol is linked to higher rates of death from cancer.

Those meetings were reported and published in journals and ultimately those scientists decided, “Our public health mission to prevent heart disease via a low saturated fat diet is so important that we’re just going to ignore these results on cancer. That’s where it had stood ever since. Those are the potential cancer effects. Again, these are randomized controlled clinical trials. Those are cause and effect findings the most rigorous science we have.

There’s a tremendous amount of data on the oxidation effects of seed oils, which are more well-known now. I found out about those because in the beginning my book was supposed to be on trans-fat. I spent the first couple years of my book hanging out with seed oil scientists like going to their industry meetings and subscribing. I joined their industry to learn everything that they do is paywall. You can’t get to it. I learned that for them, oxidation is an obvious and well-known affected these oils. They have all kinds of measures to deal with it.

They have things like nitrogen blankets that they put over fryers in McDonald’s and Burger King and other places to prevent the oxidation products from releasing into the air because if they get into the air, they solidify like shellac on the walls. They can’t get them off. It hardens up in clogs. The drains of the friars. They’re so volatile, those chemicals that when they take the workers uniforms to be cleaned, they will spontaneously combust in the back of the truck traveling to the dry cleaner.

Even after they’re cleaned, they will spontaneously combust in the dryer because they are still these highly volatile oxidations, what we call peroxidation products. Why does that happen? I want to explain for people who are interested those polyunsaturated fats, poly means multiple double bonds in a molecule. Each of those double bonds that are between the carbons under conditions of heat but, even just light like the oils on your counter for a while.

Those double bonds open up and attached to oxygen. That’s what oxidation is. They oxidized and because they have multiple double bonds, they oxidize a lot. The fatty acid in olive oil only has one double bond, so only one chance for oxidation. In saturated fats, what the saturated refers to is the saturation of those double bonds with hydrogen atoms, meaning they have no double bonds. Those are straight molecules, no double bonds, and no chance for oxidation. That’s the chemistry of it.

That is why you don’t want to have polyunsaturated fats in your foods. They’re even in most nuts and seeds. That’s why nuts and seeds go rancid over time. There are a lot higher in chicken than they are in red meat, but the main source, the tsunami of them comes from all these seed oils. They’re the best term, although, this will never take hold down. It’s plant oils. Most come from seeds but some of them come from beans. The most common oil used in America is soybean oil.

I’m so glad you gave us a little chemistry info tips on this because this is important for our health. Sally years ago did a DVD called the Oiling of America. I’ve interviewed her, Tom Cowan and Kate Shanahan on the problem with seed oils and cholesterol, this association between what’s causing heart disease, and chronic illness being at the root of the issue. It’s not what we’ve been told. We’ve been told high cholesterol leads to heart disease but it’s the opposite. It is shocking. I’m so glad you wrote your book, The Big Fat Surprise as well.

What Will Happen With These Dietary Guidelines

As we start to wrap up, Nina, I want to ask. I know it’s hard to tell but do you feel like the fact that there’s a spotlight on the need to reform these guidelines and the fact that your group has been working for a decade to bring about some reform and offering recommendations. Is there light at the end of the tunnel in terms of where these guidelines may end up?

I think it’s too early to say. I don’t know. I know that there are good people at USDA. I know that Secretary Kennedy wants to change. I just do not know if the folks with the best science will rise to the top or if they will be able to prevail over what are enormous forces against change. We’re up against all of big pharma, all a big food and against the climate change folks who think there should be no more consumption of animal foods or far less and want to eliminate animals from animal agriculture.

The animal rights folks and the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which is surprisingly influential including had a member on the dietary guidelines advisory committee for USDA who believe that everybody must become vegan in order for there to be a second coming. The forces that influence nutrition are large and some of them are wild. I don’t know yet what will happen. As in anything with this administration is unpredictable and maybe a very wild ride.

Nina’s One Tip To Improve Your Health

I’m grateful that you’re in the trenches and you’re not giving up. We’re not either. Our message has stayed true for decades now. As we start to wind up this conversation, I want to ask you the question I love to pose at the end of the program. If the reader could just do one thing, Nina, to personally improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

I would suggest do not fear fat and choose natural whole animal fats over seed oils.

We’re happy because we eat fat. I love it so much. Nina, on half of the Weston A. Price Foundation, it has been a pleasure talking with you.

Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

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Our guest was Nina Teicholz. You can visit her website NinaTeicholz.com or NutritionCoalition.us to learn more. Remember to follow this show on the app of your choice or download our Wise Traditions App on your Apple or Android device. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well. Remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

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On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, thanks for reading. We have many free resources to support you on your health journey. Visit WestonAPrice.org to find podcasts, articles, videos, and more. You can also find a local chapter near you for help in finding sources of great food. We invite you to support the foundation’s mission of education, research, and activism by becoming a member. Thanks again and take care.

Wise Traditions is a project of the Weston A. Price Foundation for wise traditions in food farming, and the healing arts. The content on this show is provided for informational purposes only, and is not intended to substitute for the advice provided by your doctor or other healthcare professional. It is not intended to be, nor does it constitute healthcare or medical advice.

About Nina Teicholz

Nina Teicholz, Ph.D., is a New York-based science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat–especially saturated fat and seed oils. Teicholz is also the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit working to ensure that nutrition policy reflects the best and most current science. Teicholz has appeared on most major TV networks, and her work has been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Economist, as well as in academic journals, including The BMJ, Nutrients, and PNAS Nexus. A Stanford, Oxford, and Reading University graduate, she has a Ph.D. in nutrition, focusing on evidence-based dietary policy.