Top 40 Nina Teicholz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It was a Kafkaesque circle of reasoning. Keys’s hypothesis had evidently managed to sail over the normal hurdles of scientific proof such that the mere act of testing the diet was now considered unethical.”

— Nina Teicholz

2. “The food world is particularly prey to corruption, because so much money is made on food and so much depends on talk and especially the opinions of experts.”

— Nina Teicholz

3. “The British Royal Navy’s Surgeon Captain Thomas L. Cleave had seen the same phenomenon in so many remote areas to which he traveled in the early 1900s that he called all chronic illnesses the “saccharine diseases,” because so many of these ailments arrived in concert with the introduction of refined carbohydrates – principally sugar and white flour.”

— Nina Teicholz

4. “Not only have government food programs switched over to low-fat products, but pretty much every food company in the country has reformulated its products, from Tyson’s skinless chicken breasts to low-fat soups, spreads, yogurts, and cookies.”

— Nina Teicholz

5. “The vast majority of hydrogenated oils consumed by Americans are made from soybeans, and this has been true since the 1960s.”

— Nina Teicholz

6. “Not only did the selection of chicken as the dominant meat source have no basis in the history of the Mediterranean diet, but one could reasonably question whether chicken has the same effect on health as do Cretan goats or kids or lamb. Red meat, for example, has a far greater abundance of vitamins B12 and B6, as well as the nutrients selenium, thiamine, riboflavin, and iron, than does chicken.”

— Nina Teicholz

7. “Yet despite this shaky and often contradictory evidence, the idea that red meat is a principal dietary culprit has thoroughly pervaded our national conversation for decades.”

— Nina Teicholz

8. “Ironically – or perhaps tellingly – the heart disease “epidemic” began after a period of exceptionally reduced meat eating.”

— Nina Teicholz

9. “The day the FDA rule came out, there were partially hydrogenated oils in some 42,720 packaged food products, including 100 percent of crackers, 95 percent of cookies, 85 percent of breading and croutons, 75 percent of baking mixes, 70 percent of chip-type snacks, 65 percent of margarines, and 65 percent of pie shells, frosting, and chocolate chips.”

— Nina Teicholz

10. “The main problem with all these newly developed fats and fat replacers coming out of food company laboratories is that their effects on health have barely been studied.”

— Nina Teicholz

11. “Americans in the nineteenth century ate four to five times more butter than we do today, and at least six times more lard.”

— Nina Teicholz

12. “His colleague in the United Kingdom, Gerald Shaper, the researcher who studied the Samburu tribe in Kenya, also found the American diet-heart proponents incomprehensible: “People like Jerry Stamler and Ancel Keys raised the blood pressure of British cardiologists to a level which was not believable. It was something strange; it was not rational, it was not scientific.”

— Nina Teicholz

13. “That heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer might be caused by the kinds of carbohydrates consumed in modern diets has also been the conclusion of many doctors and researchers who observed primitive populations as they began to eat these foods.”

— Nina Teicholz

14. “A recent USDA report says that our consumption of meat is at a “record high,” and this impression is repeated in the media. It implies that our health problems are associated with this rise in meat consumption, but these analyses are misleading because they lump together red meat and chicken into one category to show the growth of meat eating overall, when it’s just the chicken consumption that has gone up astronomically since the 1970s.”

— Nina Teicholz

15. “While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. And the whole system by which ideas are canonized as fact seems to have failed us.”

— Nina Teicholz

16. “No studies had been done on whether a low-fat diet was better – or even safe – for infants, children, adolescents, pregnant or lactating women, or the elderly, yet the diet-heart hypothesis had taken hold to such a degree in the expert community that it was just considered a commonsense measure of prevention against heart disease for everyone at any stage of life over the age of two to start on this regime.”

— Nina Teicholz

17. “Simply put, there were some ten million Americans of a prime age for having a heart attack at the turn of the twentieth century, but heart attacks appeared not to have been a common problem.”

— Nina Teicholz

18. “The other major chronic disease whose appearance seemed to coincide with the coming of refined carbohydrates was cancer.”

— Nina Teicholz

19. “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”

— Nina Teicholz

20. “The AHA even rode the profit wave of refined carbohydrates from the 1990s onward by charging a hefty fee for the privilege of putting the AHA’s “Heart Healthy” check mark on products, with the label ending up on some dubious candidates, such as Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies, and low-fat Pop-Tarts.”

— Nina Teicholz

21. “Lifshitz found, and the worst vitamin deficiencies occurred on the lowest-fat diets, even when protein intake was adequate.”

— Nina Teicholz

22. “One thing is clear,” they continued about the two recently published epidemiological studies, “statistical association must not be immediately equated with cause and effect.”

— Nina Teicholz

23. “The consumption of “sweets” in the Seven Countries study, as you might remember, correlated more closely with heart disease rates than did any other kind of food:.”

— Nina Teicholz

24. “The beginning of the end for trans fats came not from any American scientist, since critics of trans fats in the US research community had effectively been marginalized. Instead, it came from Holland:.”

— Nina Teicholz

25. “The journal articles that Willett’s team wrote to establish the pyramid were not subject to the peer-review process that scientific papers normally undergo; they had only one reviewer, not the usual two to three. This was because the papers were published, along with the entire 1993 Cambridge conference proceedings, in a special supplement of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition funded by the olive oil industry.”

— Nina Teicholz

26. “The two men could barely get their papers published. Nor could Kummerow raise funds for scientific meetings to discuss trans fats – though he certainly tried – for the obvious reason that the usual underwriters of such gatherings were members of industry, and they didn’t want to touch the topic with a ten-foot pole.”

— Nina Teicholz

27. “Margarine’s Fatty Acids Raise Concern,” read the Associated Press headline in 1990. These findings came as a shock to everyone, especially the major health groups, which had been recommending margarine as a healthier alternative to butter for decades.”

— Nina Teicholz

28. “Indeed, for the first 250 years of American history, even the poor in the United States could afford meat or fish for every meal. The fact that the workers had so much access to meat was precisely why observers regarded the diet of the New World to be superior to that of the Old.”

— Nina Teicholz

29. “It’s important to realize that in 1970, when the AHA started telling Americans to cut back on total fat, this regime had not been tested in clinical trials. All those famous big, early trials had been on the “low-cholesterol,” or “prudent” diet – high in vegetable oils and low in saturated fats – but when it came to reducing fat overall, as the AHA was now advising, the evidence was nonexistent.”

— Nina Teicholz

30. “Thus all the early ideas about trans fats from Kummerow and others that should have been debated and dissected through the back-and-forth of lively minds, instead died in the water.”

— Nina Teicholz

31. “The promotion of carbohydrate-based foods, such as cereals, breads, crackers, and chips, was exactly the kind of dietary advice large food companies favored, since those were the products they sold. Recommending polyunsaturated oils over saturated fats also served them well because these oils were a major ingredient of their cookies and crackers and were the principal ingredient in their margarines and shortenings.”

— Nina Teicholz

32. “We removed one ingredient – the shortening – and had to add six to replace it.” These kinds of complex solutions, involving artificial stews of multiple ingredients, were necessary for most food product reformulations but, it must be said, they would not have been if the food industry had just been using butter, lard, or tallow all along.”

— Nina Teicholz

33. “Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ate three to four times more red meat than they do today.”

— Nina Teicholz

34. “Food manufacturers, from Big Food to the corner bakery, came to rely upon hydrogenated oils because they’re cheaper than butter and lard.”

— Nina Teicholz

35. “To Schaefer, it seemed obvious that the Inuit were “unable to cope with starches and sugars” to which they had been introduced.”

— Nina Teicholz

36. “So by these accounts, for the first two hundred and fifty years of American history, the entire nation would have earned a failing grade according to our modern mainstream nutritional advice.”

— Nina Teicholz

37. “While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry.”

— Nina Teicholz

38. “Vegetarian diets generally have not been shown to help people live longer.”

— Nina Teicholz

39. “These diseases clustered. When they came, they came together. And they would inevitably appear when remote populations had their first sustained exposure to Western foods.”

— Nina Teicholz

40. “What I found, incredibly, was not only that it was a mistake to restrict fat but also that our fear of the saturated fats in animal foods – butter, eggs, and meat – has never been based in solid science.”

— Nina Teicholz

41. “It turns out that every step in this chain of events has failed to be substantiated: saturated fat has not been shown to cause the most damaging kind of cholesterol to go up; total cholesterol has not been demonstrated to lead to an increased risk of heart attacks for the great majority of people, and even the narrowing of the arteries has not been shown to predict a heart attack.”

— Nina Teicholz