2017 March Board Book

Nina Teicholz, above, at the cheese counter at the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley, is the author of "The Big Fat Surprise," which concludes that saturated fats, including cheese, left, actually lead to better health. That's despite ongoing science showing weak links between heart disease and diets high in fat. For example, a 2014 scientific review in the Annals of Internal Medicine determined: "Current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats." In the fall, a UCSF professor unleashed a nutrition bombshell when he uncovered documents showing that three Harvard scientists were paid handsomely by the sugar industry in the 1960s to downplay the role of sugar in heart disease and to shift the focus to saturated fat. Meanwhile, food labeling continues to be confusing and slow to catch up to the times. Similar to avocados' previous plight, eggs still cannot be labeled healthy because of their levels of fat and cholesterol, even though increasing evidence shows little connection between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol. In 2015, the FDA told the makers of Kind bars, the nut-heavy snack, that they couldn't use the word "healthy'' on labels because of the bars' saturated fat. Last year, the FDA reversed its stance.

What troubles Teicholz is that even when Americans have followed the government's low-fat recommendations, obesity and diabetes continue to rise.

"The dominant narrative that's promoted by the public health community is it's because Americans fail to follow the guidelines," she says. "That is just totally not supported by the evidence." Between 1970 and 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the annual per capita consumption of red meat dropped by 28 percent, and whole milk by almost 80 percent, from 6 ounces to 1 ounce per day. Meanwhile, we increased our consumption of grains by 23 percent.