While Jimmy is gone on a much needed and deserved sabbatical for six months to rest and recuperate, we will be bringing you the best of the best from the vast archive of shows that Jimmy has accumulated over the last 15 years. We also will be airing shows from his wildly popular JIMMY RANTS live show that originated on Instagram Live and now resides at JimmyRants.com.

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“From the beginning when Ancel Keyes said ‘who can prove me wrong’, diet science has been characterized by their poor scientific choices.”

Nina Teicholz

Today’s interview guest is an investigative journalist named Nina Teicholz who has written columns for Gourmet magazine, The New Yorker, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. After being asked by a publisher to write a book about the health impact of trans fats over a decade ago, Teicholz found a much deeper story that was more salacious and groundbreaking than even she realized at the time–the negative attention saturated fat receives as a culprit in disease was just plain wrong and the unfounded low-fat diet advice has been the most disastrous public health experiment in world history. The culmination of over a decade of research and writing has resulted in the release of her 2014 book The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet that has already hit the New York Times bestsellers list.

Listen in to hear Jimmy and Nina discuss why we’ve never heard of her before now, the differences between her book and Gary Taubes’ classic Good Calories, Bad Calories, the history behind how the American Heart Association bought into the anti-saturated fat bias of Ancel Keys, how the anti-sugar work of John Yudkin was mocked and ridiculed by anti-fat proponents, the fraudulent way the Mediterranean diet was created (by Keys) and marketed as “healthy,” how the vilification of tropical oils like coconut oil actually led to the increased use of trans fats, how groups like the Center for the Science in the Public Interest led by Michal Jacobson have had such an influence with good and bad results, the problem with omega-6-rich polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils producing oxidation products when heated, and so much more! This new book from Nina Teicholz takes the message of Taubes to the next level in a narrative form that makes the notion of a high-fat diet more mainstream that it’s ever been before. The tide is turning and this book is going to be a big reason why.