Saturated Facts by Dr. Idrees Mughal

Saturated Facts: A Myth-Busting Guide to Diet and Nutrition in a World of Misinformation

By Dr Idrees Mughal

Penguin Life 2024

Dr Mughal’s new book Saturated Facts is an example of that all-too-rare dieting guide: the non-controversial. This market is stuffed with leaflets advising us to chug down nothing but liquified tree trunks for the next two weeks or presentations demonising the calorie as a nefarious industry invention. Here we have a bona fide specialist taking it to the crackpots and the grifters in a digestible 180 pages. Despite Mughal clearly having his ducks in a row, the book is frustratingly banal. Readers will recognise this as the rushed midnight keyboard pattering of a TikTok star filling their faces with the most unoriginal prose. Here is a writer hurrying them through scientific complexities and sullying their taste buds with cliches. 

If the prospective clientele for Saturated Facts are the rotund and wronged, Mughal is a source of necessary enlightenment. Although his sections on myth-busting are occasionally condescending (“it’s about empowering you to make informed decisions about your own health”), the initial passages discussing meat protein vs plant protein, the dastardly carbohydrate, and the origins of the ketogenic contagion are demystifying indeed. New-fangled gimmicks like carnivore diets have their virtues refuted and “the millennial need for detoxing” is swatted aside with disdain and characterised as something “born out of our obsession with purity and the guilt we feel for living a fast paced, sometimes hedonistic lifestyle.” Applauding a trusted expert for stating the self-evident knowledge of an eight year old is both a horrifying indictment of the dieting niche and a poor yardstick for a book’s quality.

For all that Mughal might be frothing with expertise and jittering with unpronounceable nomenclature, Saturated Facts is either too specific in the ‘deep delves’ or too amateurish in its composition. At one moment his readers are imagined to be keen undergraduates scribbling away in a fusty lecture hall, the next they are a circle of nappy-mudding infants for whom stylistic excrescences are somehow forgivable.  We vacillate between stodgy theories that would have the most assiduous laboratory devotee weeping with incomprehension and complacent, head-patting conclusions. “Translating the effect of a single nutrient,” Mughal writes “on a single biomarker into an accurate reflection of the effect of a complex food matrix of other nutrients and overall dietary pattern on multifaceted processes like inflammation is often deceiving.” 

These disquisitions are rendered even more ridiculous when Idz dollops unimaginative gloop onto entire pages. “The world of nutrition is an ever-evolving landscape - a complex mosaic of theories, studies and recommendations, each one clamouring for our attention and belief,” he writes. “Yet amid this cacophony of information, you now wield the tools to sift fact from fiction.” A section of such pallid mundanity, redolent of a toddler let loose in a metaphor factory, will either have readers snapping the covers shut or reaching for their cliche bingo card. He both disillusions and disappoints with these competing elements of gnomic abandon and stock-phrase indulgence. 

Saturated Facts is also a warble of inherent contradictions. First we have the stone-faced dispatches of hard truth. Those who wrongly believe poor mental health is entirely endogamous will not enjoy having their worldview burnt to a cinder with statements like “food drastically affects our mental health, and not enough emphasis is placed on the role that nutrition plays in depression.” Sophists who cannot countenance obesity’s certain involvement in terrible life expectancy will hate Mughal saying that the Health at Every Size Movement (HAES) “doesn't fully capture the complexity of health outcomes related to weight.” But he can’t even let the most tepid truths go unopposed. He climbs down from some refreshing authority presumably because the TikTokers trawling through this have never had responsibility and will-power offered up as worthwhile characteristics. He messes about when mentioning that undeniable helpful mantras similar to ‘eat less, move more’ are “reductionist pieces of advice” on a par with “mainstream fad diets.” 

This critic feels harsh imputing laziness, ruinous ambiguity and exaggerated academic zeal to Mughal when he’s an uncertain first-timer clearly ignorant of an author’s duty of entertainment. His messaging and gobbets of dietary advice will count for nought unless his writing is simultaneously mature, readable and exciting. Saturated Facts is shot through with highfalutin terminology that will mean nothing to the overweight mother of three trying to shed five kilograms. His professional candour will finally set the unhealthy and misled down the right path but that most cloying of artificial sweeteners - the sickly cliche - has one rushing for the loo. 

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull.