Meat & Fat are Healthy & Nutritious Foods

Despite what the American Heart Association - and Michelle Obama - like to believe, eating meat and foods with saturated fat is not unhealthy. And meat and dairy are not the villain in America's battle with expanding waist lines, diabetes, and heart disease. At least that's what most of the research shows, as collected and artfully presented by health writer and investigative journalist, Nina Teicholz in her new book, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

Americans have been fighting the Battle of the Bulge, and equating the enemy with meat and milk for at least fifty years now. At that approach is mostly likely based on flawed data and the mistakenly belief about what causes the body to put on weight in the form of "body fat." Teicholz, who has been writing about health and nutrition for years, began to investigate America's "issue with fat" when she was assigned a story by her editor at Gourmet to report on the trans fat problem in processed foods. She began to learn just how much mis-information led to "How Americans Got Red Meat Wrong." It's pretty clear that there is no causation, and not even any real correlation between meat consumption and America's weight and heart disease crisis.



The problem, of course, is that Americans love to latch on to a narrative, and will firmly believe it even after evidence exposes its flaws. And that has driven the low-fat and non-fat craze in food production - a movement that has done nothing to decrease America's health issues. And now that issue is invading the public education reform movement, as the new healthy lunch standards limit kids to skim and non-fat milk for no good reason. This sort of misinformation spread by deceptive organizations like the USDA, and naive campaigners like Michelle Obama, is doing nothing to address health issues, and will only seek in driving high school kids away from the federal lunch program.

It's worth noting just how misguided we have been about health and diet, as evidenced by the realization that even as Americans increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables, the weight problems continue to grow.