Somewhere between 25 and 45 percent of the calories in your diet are likely coming from a substance most people know nothing about, a seemingly innocuous oil with no colour or flavour, that is quite possibly more harmful to your health than smoking cigarettes. Whether you shop at a health food store or a discount supermarket, the ingredient labels on most products in your kitchen right now may contain the following phrase: Vegetable Oil (contains one or more of the following: cottonseed, corn, canola, rapeseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower). And they're leading to uncontrollable hunger, inflammation, blood sugar swings and mental illness.

Family doctor and New York Times bestselling author Dr Catherine Shanahan walks us through the science of how vegetable oils affect the body, exposes the corruption that deceives doctors and consumers into eating them, and gives us a clear and hopeful roadmap to recovery and rejuvenation. Dark Calories is the first book to definitively show that refined vegetable oil is the defining ingredient in both junk food and the entire modern diet and makes the case that eliminating it is the single best thing you can do for your health.