Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

Most people who tell me carnivore didn't work for them learned it from the first wave of meatfluencers, and that first wave couldn't have told you where the fat was on a cow.

They were busy with the organs. Nose to tail or you weren't serious. Raw liver eaten to camera like a dare. Heart, kidney, spleen, a bull's testicle for the thumbnail. And at the end of every sermon, the freeze-dried organ capsules, discount code in the description. Strange how the gospel always finished at a checkout.

Fat got a line, if it got anything.

That's the diet upside down. Take away the carbohydrate and fat is the fuel, the only fuel left. Protein builds you; it was never meant to run you. The trappers of the north had a name for living on lean meat alone: rabbit starvation. Pounds of it a day, and they wasted away with full stomachs.

So the beginners did exactly as they were shown. Sirloin with the white trimmed off. Chicken breast. A palmful of capsules and a glass of water.

By week three they were exhausted, blocked up, ravenous and dreaming about toast. Back to the bread they went, telling everyone carnivore had nearly killed them.

They never tried carnivore. They tried lean protein and pills, then blamed the cow.

That's the mess I spend most of my week cleaning up.

- Buy the cut with the most white on it.
- Treat butter as a food, not a garnish.
- Pour the fat from the pan back over the meat.
- Tip what's left in the pan into a mug and drink it.

Nobody in six years has ever quit carnivore because there was too much butter on the plate. They quit because there wasn't enough.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Everything alive on this planet turns towards the sun.

Flowers swing to face it through the day.

Trees grow crooked to reach it.

Lizards lie flat on the rock to soak it in.

Cattle leave the shed to graze in it.

Dogs find the one warm patch on the carpet and sleep in it.

Babies turn their faces to the window.

Our skin makes a hormone from it that no food can fully replace.

Our blood pressure drops the moment it touches us.

Our body clock runs on it, and sleep falls apart without it.

Two million years of humans worked, hunted and rested by it.

Then one species, on the advice of a leaflet, started slathering chemicals on its skin to keep it out.

The flowers never got the memo. Neither did your bones.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1797, a British Army surgeon called John Rollo had a diabetic officer passing sugar in his urine.

He put him on meat and fat. The sugar vanished. The officer recovered. Rollo wrote it up.

For the next hundred years, low-carbohydrate eating was the standard treatment for diabetes. In the textbooks, on the wards, in what doctors actually did.

In 1915, Frederick Allen opened a diabetes clinic at the Rockefeller Institute. There was no insulin. He kept patients alive on almost no carbohydrate at all, and some lived long enough to receive the first insulin in 1922.

The diet bought them years they had no other way of getting.

Then insulin arrived, and the diet became an inconvenience.

If a needle could handle the blood sugar, nobody needed to restrict the bread. The drug had a manufacturer. The diet had nobody.

In the 1950s, Elliott Joslin, the most influential diabetes doctor in America, began quietly loosening the carbohydrate limits that had defined his own field for 150 years.

In 1977, the McGovern guidelines told the entire American public to cut fat and eat more carbohydrate. Diabetics were not excused.

By the 1980s, the American Diabetes Association was recommending that 50 to 60% of a diabetic's calories come from carbohydrate.

Half of every meal from the one thing the disease is defined by being unable to handle.

The prescriptions went up. The insulin doses went up. The amputations went up. The pharmaceutical companies posted earnings that would embarrass a small country.

In 2008, the ADA conceded that low-carbohydrate diets could be appropriate. As an option. In a footnote. After thirty years of recommending the reverse.

In 2019, a two-year trial put type 2 diabetics on a low-carbohydrate diet, and more than half came off their medication with normal blood sugar. The same result Rollo wrote up in 1797.

In 2021, Diabetes UK quietly published guidance accepting low-carbohydrate eating as a valid option.

224 years after the case report.

Remarkable pace.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

University debate: "Carnivore is just the latest fad diet."

Dietitian: "A fad has three marks. It appears from nowhere, it's sold by influencers, and it has no track record in a real population. Carnivore ticks all three. It was invented on the internet about eight years ago."

Anthropologist: "What was the year?"

Dietitian: "2018, give or take."

Anthropologist: "1928. A hospital ward in New York. An Arctic explorer and a colleague ate nothing but meat for a year under medical observation because the doctors were certain it would kill them. It didn't. They published the results and the doctors moved on to something else."

Dietitian: "Two men. That's an anecdote."

Anthropologist: "The explorer had learned it from the Inuit, who'd been doing it for a thousand years."

Dietitian: "The Inuit had no choice. You can't grow kale on ice."

Anthropologist: "The Maasai had a choice. They live in some of the best farmland in Africa, surrounded by people growing maize, and they chose milk, meat and blood for centuries and looked down on the farmers for digging."

Dietitian: "A small tribe. Genetically adapted."

Anthropologist: "The Mongols were not a small tribe. Meat and mare's milk, no bread, and they ran the largest land empire there has ever been. The people they conquered ate grain and were, on average, shorter than their horses' ears."

Dietitian: "That's warfare, not health. They died young."

Anthropologist: "Genghis went at about sixty-five, in the saddle, with his teeth. The gauchos of the pampas lived on beef and nothing else for two hundred years, and when a young English naturalist rode with them in 1833 he wrote that he'd gone weeks on meat alone and didn't dislike it at all. His name was Darwin. He turned out to know a bit about what humans are adapted to."

Dietitian: "A travel diary."

Anthropologist: "Every one of these is a travel diary to you. The Plains tribes on bison, the Sami on reindeer, the Scottish Highlander on his cow, the Irish on milk and beef before the potato was imposed on them. Each one you call an exception, and I've named six continents."

Dietitian: "They all got sick eventually."

Anthropologist: "They all got sick on the same day. The day the flour, the sugar and the seed oil arrived in the trading post. Not one of them got sick on the meat. Which brings me to your third mark. No track record in a real population."

Dietitian: "The modern version has none."

Anthropologist: "What's the track record of yours?"

Dietitian: "Mine?"

Anthropologist: "Low fat, six to eleven servings of grain, seed oil for the heart. First published 1977. No population on earth had ever eaten it before. Pushed by a committee, sold on television, and inside forty years the people who followed it were the fattest and sickest humans ever recorded."

Dietitian: "That's an oversimplification."

Anthropologist: "Appeared from nowhere, sold by the famous, no track record. Your definition, your three marks. One of us is defending the fad diet here, and hers is only forty-nine years old."

Moderator: "Closing."

Dietitian: "A diet of only meat has never been tested properly."

Anthropologist: "It was tested on every people who ever had a herd. Yours was tested on you. How's it going?"



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Most classic dishes are an animal food carrying a plant that was only there for the look of it, and the fix is to put the plant down.

Creamed spinach. Have the cream.

Cauliflower cheese. Have the cheese.

Buttered peas. Have the butter.

Steak and chips. Have the steak, and fry the fat that would have gone on the chips.

Bacon sandwich. Have the bacon, and dip it in the egg.

Cheese on toast. Have the cheese, grilled, on itself.

Beef stew with dumplings. Have the beef, and drink the gravy out of the mug.

Roast lamb with mint sauce. Have the lamb, and stop apologising for it with vinegar.

Chicken salad. Have the egg instead, and skip the chicken as well.

Full English. Have the sausage, the bacon, the eggs and the black pudding, and leave the beans in the tin where the sugar is.

Fish and chips. Have the fish, in dripping, with the skin on.

Cream tea. Have the clotted cream, and the scone can carry it to your mouth or your spoon can.

Every one of these meals was built around the animal and padded out with the cheapest thing in the kitchen, so the padding is the only part you're giving up.

Nobody has ever stared at an empty plate and missed the spinach.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Most classic dishes are an animal food carrying a plant that was only there for the look of it, and the fix is to put the plant down.

Creamed spinach. Have the cream.

Cauliflower cheese. Have the cheese.

Buttered peas. Have the butter.

Steak and chips. Have the steak, and fry the fat that would have gone on the chips.

Bacon sandwich. Have the bacon, and dip it in the egg.

Cheese on toast. Have the cheese, grilled, on itself.

Beef stew with dumplings. Have the beef, and drink the gravy out of the mug.

Roast lamb with mint sauce. Have the lamb, and stop apologising for it with vinegar.

Chicken salad. Have the egg instead, and skip the chicken as well.

Full English. Have the sausage, the bacon, the eggs and the black pudding, and leave the beans in the tin where the sugar is.

Fish and chips. Have the fish, in dripping, with the skin on.

Cream tea. Have the clotted cream, and the scone can carry it to your mouth or your spoon can.

Every one of these meals was built around the animal and padded out with the cheapest thing in the kitchen, so the padding is the only part you're giving up.

Nobody has ever stared at an empty plate and missed the spinach.



Mike

Zoals eerder gezegd, ik ga niet mee in zijn totale aversie tegen alles wat plantaardig is. Ik heb niets met groente en fruit (ook nooit gehad), maar met kruiden des te meer. Mint sauce is heeeeerlijk bij lam, verse rozemarijn ook!

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The year is 180. You are a gladiator in Ephesus, and the films will give you a body like a bronze statue. You are fed barley porridge and beans, and the crowd calls you a barley man to your face. The porridge puts a layer of fat over your muscle so the cuts bleed instead of killing, which is good for the show. The man who owns you dines on dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed. When your bones are dug up eighteen centuries later they are full of barley and almost nothing else, and a man at a university will call your diet plant-forward.

The year is 1300. You are a villein on a Hampshire manor, living, as the brochure will one day put it, in harmony with the land. The land gives you pottage: peas, beans and oats in the one pot, every day, until you die of it at forty. The hall above you smells of venison from the lord's own park, roast pork, eel, swan, butter from cows you milked before dawn. Take one deer from his wood and you lose a hand. The court that decides it sits in his hall, after dinner.

The year is 1755. You are a Highland tenant eating oatmeal three times a day, and in London Dr Johnson has just printed his dictionary. Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. The laird at the head of your glen finds this very funny over his beef. The beef was driven to market past your door.

The year is 1795. You are a Berkshire farm labourer and a clergyman is at your table with a notebook, writing down what your children eat. Bread. Tea. A little cheese. Bacon on Sunday if the pig did well. He prints it as a national disgrace. The squire you work for has a joint every day of the year and is told from the pulpit that your trouble is thrift.

The year is 1847. You are in County Clare and the potatoes have gone black in the ground for the second year running. Your family lived on them, ten pounds a day for a working man, and you are sitting in a cabin with nothing. At the harbour the ships are loading cattle, pigs, butter and bacon for England, under armed guard. The agent on the quay looks well. So does the bullock walking up the gangplank past the people who raised it.

The year is 1933. You are in a village outside Kharkiv. The grain quota has been collected, then collected again, then the brigades have come with iron rods to probe the floors for anything buried. Your children are eating boiled bark, and the dog next door has stopped barking. In the district town there is a shop for Party members with a curtain over the window. Behind the curtain there is sausage.

The year is 1997. You are in North Pyongan and the rations stopped months ago. You are stripping the inner bark from pines and boiling grass, and the famine will take hundreds of thousands before it ends. The Dear Leader's personal chef is flying to Japan for tuna, to Denmark for pork and to Iran for caviar, and will write a book about it.

The year is 2026. You are in a supermarket in England. The posters say eat less meat for the planet. The spread is plant-based, the cereal has a heart on the box, and the beef carries a warning about its footprint. You take the lentils, because you are a responsible person, and you pay more for them than the villein's pottage ever cost anyone.

The people who put the posters up flew to the climate conference, and the menu had beef on it. They eat what the lord ate, what the laird ate, what the agent on the quay ate, what the man behind the curtain ate.

Two thousand years, and the diet of grain and beans was always what the powerful handed down to the people beneath them. Everyone at both ends of the table knew what it meant.

Now it has a name, a logo and a moral, and for the first time in history the peasant is paying extra for it.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In March 1855 the most famous chef in London walked into the army hospital kitchens at Scutari and found the orderlies pouring the best part of the soldiers' dinner away.

Alexis Soyer ran the kitchens of the Reform Club, wrote bestselling cookbooks, wore his cap at a rakish angle and could never resist a newspaper. When the dispatches from the Crimea reached The Times, with sick and wounded men dying in their thousands, more of them from disease and bad food than from the Russians, he wrote to the paper offering to go out at his own expense and sort out the cooking.

The government could not believe its luck and sent him.

At Scutari, across the water from Constantinople, he found Florence Nightingale's hospital fed by orderlies with no training at all. Joints of meat tied to sticks and dropped into coppers of boiling water. A soldier's ration was a pound of meat and a pound of bread, and between the coppers and the orderlies, most of what was good in it was going missing.

When the dinners had been served he noticed a big copper still half full of rich broth, with about three inches of fat floating on top, and asked what became of it.

Throw it away, sir, they told him.

Soyer stopped them. The broth went into soup. The fat was skimmed off and used in place of butter. He rewrote the hospital diets, had the coppers retinned, trained cooks, and invented a field stove, an iron drum with the fire in the bottom, that cooked for a company on a fraction of the fuel. Nightingale, who did not hand out praise, called his death three years later a disaster for the army.

The British Army used his stove, modified over the years, for well over a century. The last big consignment went to the bottom of the South Atlantic in 1982 aboard the Atlantic Conveyor, hit by an Exocet off the Falklands.

A century after Scutari the same instruction came back as public health advice, with a chart attached, and it said exactly what the orderly said.

Throw it away, sir.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Your great-grandmother never did any of the things keeping you healthy, and she lived to see her grandchildren's children.

She never counted a calorie, because the word had not reached the kitchen.

She never drained a pan. The fat went into a bowl on the cold shelf for tomorrow's eggs.

She never bought a fat-free anything, because the shop did not stock an absence.

She never ate little and often. She ate when the work was done and until she was full, twice.

She never trimmed a joint. The crisp fat was the piece the children fought for.

She never owned a bottle of oil. She owned a tin of dripping and a dish of butter, and the butter lived on the table.

She never skimmed the milk. The cream came off the top and went on everything.

She never read a label, because there was nothing on the back of a chop.

She never once feared the sun, a sausage, an egg, a cheese or a roast, and she never once had anything to confess in January.

Everything she did is now a heresy, and everything she never did is on a government graphic.

Eat like her. She was right the first time, and the second, and the third.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Doctor: Your triglycerides are high. That's the fat in your blood. I want you on a low fat diet.

Patient: Where does the fat in my blood come from?

Doctor: Your diet.

Patient: Straight from the plate into the vein?

Doctor: Not exactly. Most of it's made in the liver.

Patient: Out of what?

Doctor: Whatever's in surplus.

Patient: Which is?

Doctor: Carbohydrate, generally. Sugar, starch, alcohol. The liver packages it as fat and sends it out.

Patient: So the fat in my blood was bread last week.

Doctor: In part.

Patient: And the plan is to take the fat off my plate and leave the bread on it.

Doctor: Low fat is the standard advice for lipids.

Patient: You've just told me the lipid's made from the carbohydrate.

Doctor: Fat is still the most energy-dense.

Patient: I'm not asking what's dense. I'm asking what my liver turns into the stuff you've measured. You said sugar and starch. Then you prescribed sugar and starch.

Doctor: Wholegrain versions.

Patient: Does my liver check the label?

Doctor: ...

Patient: What happens to triglycerides when people cut the carbohydrate instead?

Doctor: They tend to fall. Quite quickly.

Patient: How quickly?

Doctor: Weeks.

Patient: Then write that down and we'll both save a year.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The man who buried the Duke of Wellington invented the low-carb diet, and the medical press told him to mind his own business.

William Banting was the royal undertaker. He furnished the funerals of the great, and in 1852 he put on the biggest one London had ever seen, and he was by then a short man, 5ft 5, who weighed over 14 stone and could not bend to tie his shoes. He went downstairs backwards to save his knees. He wore a truss for a hernia. His hearing was going and his eyes were failing, and he was 65.

He had tried everything. Three Turkish baths a week. Rowing on the Thames every morning, which made him strong and hungry and heavier. Gallons of physic. A spa. In twenty years of doctors he had lost 6lb.

In August 1862 he went to see a surgeon about his ears. William Harvey had just come back from Paris, where he had heard a physiologist lecture on what sugar and starch did to a body, and he looked at the deaf undertaker and said the ears were not the problem. He gave him a sheet. Meat, fish, game, a glass of claret, and no bread, no sugar, no beer, no potatoes. He told him to drop butter and milk too, which was the one thing the century got wrong, and it did not matter.

By the end of the year Banting had lost 46lb and 12 inches off his waist. He could hear. He could tie his own shoes. He put on his old suit for his friends and stood inside it like a man in a tent.

Then he did the thing no gentleman was supposed to do. He wrote it all down, every stone and every meal, in a pamphlet called Letter on Corpulence, and paid for it himself, and gave the first editions away free. By the fifth edition 63,000 copies had gone, in English and then in French, German and Swedish, where his name is still the word for dieting.

The Lancet advised him not to meddle with medical literature again. The profession's view was that the literature on corpulence was tolerably complete. He had cured himself of a condition it had failed to cure for twenty years and it told him to go back to his coffins.

Everybody knows low carb began with Atkins in 1972, or with a podcast. It began with a Victorian undertaker's deafness and a surgeon who had sat in a lecture, and the pamphlet has never been out of print.

There are about 1.5 million people in Britain on a slimming injection this year. Banting's sheet cost a penny and he gave it away.



Mike