Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Dietary Guidelines – Nina Teicholz Reveals the Truth

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This week on the podcast, Mikki speaks to Nina Teicholz, Ph.D.—science journalist, bestselling author of The Big Fat Surprise, and Executive Director of The Nutrition Coalition.

In this conversation, Nina sheds light on one of the most under-acknowledged crises in public health: the fragile scientific foundation of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. In essence, nutrition science continues to shape national policy despite being built on weak, inconsistent, and sometimes fundamentally flawed evidence.

They discuss a recent paper published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which found the systematic reviews used to support the guidelines to be of “critically low quality”. Nina breaks down why this matters, how key types of research have been excluded, and why the process lacks transparency and rigour. They explore how industry influence, institutional bias, and intellectual legacy all contribute to a status quo that continues to recommend reductions in red meat and saturated fat—despite the absence of robust evidence to support these claims.

Nina also explains how these guidelines, which legally shape everything from school lunches to military rations, may be doing more harm than good when it comes to public health—particularly in the face of rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

If you’ve ever wondered why nutrition policy seems out of sync with both emerging science and common sense—or what it would take to fix it—this is an episode not to miss.

Nina Teicholz Ph.D. is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise. She’s been a pioneer in challenging the conventional wisdom on saturated fats, vegetable (seed) oils, the health halo around the Mediterranean diet, and the reliability of the U.S. national dietary guidelines. Her work has been favorably reviewed by top medical journals, including the Lancet, and her own writing has been published in academic journals such as the BMJ, Nutrients and a journal of the National Academy of Sciences as well as media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and Economist. Teicholz has also appeared on most major TV networks and many podcasts, from NPR to Joe Rogan. She is a graduate of Stanford and Oxford Universities, and in 2024, she received a Ph.D. in nutrition focused on evidence-based nutrition policy. For years, she ran a non-profit called the Nutrition Coalition aimed at updating the US dietary guidelines with the current science. Her work can now be found in a column on Substack called “Unsettled Science.”

Teicholz has no commercial ties and has never received support from any industry for her work.

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