I have finished the gigantic tome “The Big Fat Surprise” by Nina Teicholz. I am depressed. I am depressed because I am one hundred percent convinced that every word found in the final, summary chapter is true. I am depressed because I will probably never see the day when all of that truth is considered the working science on the subject. It is an unfortunate truth that bad science is never defeated by truth, truth must wait for the men that have made their living espousing bad science to pass away.

In summary of the book (but please get it and read it) you should be getting all of the calories that you are currently getting from carbohydrates from saturated fats instead. There is nothing wrong or unhealthy with eating red meats that contain natural fats. Eating foods cooked in vegetable oil is dangerous, since vegetable oil is unstable when heated or reused because it creates oils that cause heart disease.

You can’t look anywhere in the media or in diet advice that has that good news in it yet. I read Mother Jones online magazine for diet articles all the time and this morning I find this:

I Used to Be a Snob About Fake Meat. I Was Dead Wrong.

In the article we see quotes from Mark Bittman about the energy balance of eating meats instead of eating the foods that meats eat. We see the argument that it might be better to eat processed plant proteins that factory farmed meats because:

The argument is powerful. Factory-farmed meat doesn’t taste like much, yet generates all manner of wreckage, from antibiotic-resistant pathogens to fouled water and air to horrific working conditions and what amounts to systematized animal torture. Indeed, why not just eat some soybeans tarted up to look and taste like meat instead?

When you compare factory meat-like creations against factory farmed meat you can make these decisions, but when you compare factory meat or factory fake meat to locally produced meats from local farmers raised in the way that nature intended all of the meat disadvantages go away.

This is why I always say that you can’t wait for everyone to be helped by the system. Our government is not about to mandate any kind of food. They are still making exactly the wrong recommendations, after all. Our food industry is still trying to crank out foods with no fat, no meat, that closely resemble the look and feel of the real thing. Meanwhile the real thing is available to you. Does it matter to you that currently there is not enough locally grown meat to feed you and all of your neighbors? It makes me sad that there isn’t, but that does not stop me from advocating the real thing for me, my family and my readers. That means you. I am advocating that you join me in doing the very best thing for you.

Caring about everyone in my neighborhood, that they are getting bad official advice, that they are reading bad advice today from Mother Jones, that it is hard for them to lose weight or maintain their health because of all that bad advice makes it hard for me to be happy. I would be happy if suddenly we could all see the obvious, that we were misled with the best of intentions back in 1960, that there has never been any reason to choose carbohydrate over saturated fat. I would be happy if I never read again that you should do everything you can when cooking to lower the amount of fat in the finished food. I will never see that day, probably, except for on this blog, and occasionally in the media, as another clinical trial proves what the others ones have proved, that the conventional wisdom is dead wrong. Tom Philpott says:

While I still maintain that you’d be better off just eating beans than hyperprocessed beans made to simulate meat, I can acknowledge that most people don’t want to eat just beans—and that these products are likely nutritionally superior to the factory-farmed meat they aim to replace. And Jacobson supplies evidence that such products are already luring meat eaters away from meat at fast-food joints. “When Chipotle added shredded-tofu Sofritas to its burrito options at a few California restaurants in 2013, sales outstripped expectations,” he reports. “Half the Sofritas buyers, Chipotle found, were meat eaters.”

Most people don’t want to just eat beans. No truer words have ever been spoken. It is sad that we can’t just say “Go ahead and eat meat, real meat.” People that are lured to the Soy Simu-Meat at Chipotle are convinced that it is healthier. It is not. Nothing is healthier than healthy meat, raised in natural conditions. Nothing is healthier than that. I just read it, saw it proved to the utmost of my intellectual satisfaction in a seven hundred page book about nothing else. Eat real food, feed your family real food.

Stop eating processed foods, it’s not necessary and eighty percent of the time it is harmful.

Get your calories from saturated fats, there is nothing unhealthy about them, especially compared to liquid fats (vegetable oil) or carbohydrates that you would have to eat to replace the calories from fat.