Big Fat Lies - Hannah Sutter

[Marmot]

Read this when it came out. Easy to read (read it in a morning), simple to understand and backs up what lowcarbers know re. fat/weight loss/carbs/insulin resistance etc. Would recommend.

[katharine]

Marmot,

Did it have anything in it that we don't already know?

Katharine.

[Marmot]

Hi Katherine, most experienced lowcarbers might -but it was useful for me, also one or two people who had shown scepticism about my lowcarbing now think that there may be something in the 'fat is good theory ' it as it was in the Daily Mail.

[katharine]

Thanks, a bit of publicity always helps.

[larsson]

When books in the field of health and the human diet are published, they often seem to appear from one of two distinct perspectives. Those published by recognised physicians such as Drs. Richard Bernstein, Charles Clark or Wolfgang Lutz benefit from the professional credibility of their authors, while other writers, without the authority implied by a Phd., rely instead on scholarly detachment from the medical profession or from a passion derived from direct experience. In this category there is a wide range of books from Gary Taubes masterly ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories’ ( published in the UK as ‘The Diet Delusion’) to William Banting’s personal treatise ‘Letter on Corpulence’.

In the second category we now have ‘Big Fat Lies – Is your Government making you fat?’ by Hannah Sutter. Sutter is neither a medic, nor a journalist, not even a diabetic. Rather she is an experienced lawyer who happened upon personal experiences not unlike Banting’s and subsequently applied her skills to the task of unravelling the mess of contradictory evidence which clouds so many minds.

The book deals with the obesity crisis in the developed world and the role of official agencies attempting to solve it. The familiar advice given to diabetics and to everyone else over the last 30 years has of course been to eat less, exercise more, and replace dietary fat with starch. Diabetics with the added challenge of achieving normal, stable blood glucose levels often discover that none of the recommendations successfully addresses their problems and that failure is often portrayed as a flaw in the patient’s character, rather than the advice itself.

Hannah Sutter has very convincingly treated the subject as she would a legal investigation, examining the best and most appropriate evidence before arriving at a conclusion that her predecessors, from Banting to Bernstein, would no doubt agree. The books title may be a subtle reference to Gary Taubes 2002 New York Times article ‘What if it’s all been a big fat lie?’ but this is a very different book to his. It reads as a passionate polemic and benefits from the brevity of a concisely presented legal argument. It is the kind of book that provides just the sort of evidence that those looking to take control of their physical health will find invaluable as they inevitably confront widespread scepticism. Readers will find many useful references to evidence that seriously challenge the conventional wisdom on the subject of healthy diet.

Big Fat Lies is published by Infinite Ideas Ltd., ISBN 978-1-906821-37-1.