Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

The Romans had a word of contempt for the peoples of the north, and the word was milk-drinkers.

Homer had used it first, of the horse-milking Scythians. By the Roman period it was a settled sneer: the barbarian drinks milk, the civilised man eats bread and drinks wine, and you could tell a savage by the cup in his hand. Roman writers describe the Germans, the Britons and the Gauls drinking milk with the same faint disgust they reserved for trousers.

There was a reason the Roman did not drink it himself. Most adults around the Mediterranean could not. The gene that lets a grown man digest milk sugar was rare in Italy, and it still is: the majority of southern Italians today lose the ability in childhood, as most of the human race does. The peoples Rome called milk-drinkers carried the gene at rates that now run above 90% in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Ireland and Britain, because among a cattle people the child who could keep drinking milk lived and the one who could not did not.

So the milk-drinker was a genuine biological difference, and Rome read it the wrong way round. The barbarian was drinking the most complete food a landscape can produce, straight from the animal, every day of his life. The Roman was eating the grain dole and calling that civilisation.

Two thousand years on, the tallest nations on earth are the descendants of the milk-drinkers, in the order Rome sneered at them: the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Balkan herdsmen. The descendants of the bread-eaters are four inches shorter and still cannot drink a glass of it.

Every insult in the ancient world has faded except that one, which turned out to be a diagnosis.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The most successful drug advert in history said Lipitor cuts the risk of heart attack by 36%, and the truth was in the footnote.

What the headline said:

- 36% fewer heart attacks

What the asterisk said:

- On the sugar pill, 3 people in 100 had a heart attack
- On Lipitor, 2 people in 100 had a heart attack

Both statements describe the same trial. 3 down to 2 is a drop of about a third. It is also a difference of 1 person.

What that means for the 100:

- 1 avoided a heart attack
- 2 had one anyway
- 97 were never going to have one
- 100 took the tablet every day for over three years
- 100 were exposed to the side effects

Nobody sat in a surgery was ever told "this will help 1 in 100 of you." They were told 36%, by a doctor who had been told 36%, by a rep who was paid on it.

Lipitor went on to sell well over $100 billion.

That asterisk is the most expensive piece of punctuation ever printed.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

I'd like to confess to something before it comes out another way. Last night I roasted a mutton shoulder, ate it, and then drank the fat out of the dish.

I'm aware of how this looks.

There was no gravy involved. No bread to make it respectable. I didn't decant it into a jar and pretend it was for roast potatoes. I picked up the tin with both hands, like a man receiving a trophy, and drank what was in it, warm, standing at the hob.

It tasted of mutton, which is to say of something that had lived a long time on a hill and wanted me to know about it.

I've since reviewed the guidance. I was supposed to skim it. Failing that, drain it. Failing that, blot the meat with kitchen paper and think about my arteries. At no point does the guidance cover a grown adult finishing the tin, presumably because nobody on the committee could picture it.

I felt no remorse. I slept eight hours. I woke up not hungry, in a good mood, with a fully working heart, and I'm told that's exactly how it gets you.

The sheep spent three years turning grass into that fat. The oven spent four hours releasing it. I wasn't going to hand it to the drain.

If the authorities need me, I'll be at the butcher's, asking for another shoulder.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Evolution has run the trial on dairy at least four separate times, on three continents, and returned the same verdict every time.

Every mammal switches off the enzyme for digesting milk after weaning. In northern Europe, about 7,500 years ago, a mutation appeared that leaves it switched on for life. Among the cattle herders of East Africa the same ability appeared again, three times over, through three different mutations. It turned up once more in Arabia, among people living on camel's milk.

The DNA is different in each case and the result is identical. Geneticists rank it among the strongest marks of natural selection anywhere in the human genome.

That is a statement about graves. For a gene to spread that fast, the people carrying it have to leave more living children than their neighbours, and go on doing so for hundreds of generations. In a bad year, the adult who could live on milk came through and the adult who could not did not. In Ireland and Denmark around 9 people in 10 now carry it.

Nothing else in the human diet has left a mark like that in 10,000 years.

It was the longest nutrition trial ever run. The control group left no descendants.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Mother: "They've put my daughter on the ketogenic diet for her seizures."

Friend: "Keto? Isn't that the dangerous fad one?"

Mother: "Four parts fat to one part everything else. Weighed to the gram. Cream, butter, eggs, meat. No bread, no fruit."

Friend: "On the NHS?"

Mother: "Recommended since 1921. When the drugs don't work, this does. Her seizures have halved."

Friend: "I was told cutting carbs would damage her."

Mother: "The dietitian has a chart on the wall of what it does to her brain. She calls it treatment."

Friend: "So a child's brain runs better on fat."

Mother: "A child's brain with epilepsy, officially. A child's brain without it, you're not to try."

Friend: "What's the difference?"

Mother: "A diagnosis. The ketones don't check."

Friend: "What are you eating?"

Mother: "Same as her. Somebody has to cook it, and I've not had a headache since March."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Here's a fact the nutrition industry would rather you didn't have: a modest 200g of beef delivers 100% of your daily requirement for fibre, antioxidants and phytonutrients.

The full panel, for the sceptics:

- Fibre: 0g. Requirement met in full
- Phytonutrients: 0mg. Requirement met in full
- Plant antioxidants: none. Requirement met in full
- Carbohydrate: 0g. Requirement exceeded, if anything
- Kale: 0 leaves. Comfortably within guidelines

It gets better. The same 200g also covers the things you can't live without, which the first list has in common: complete protein, B12, haem iron, zinc. It even carries its own antioxidants, carnosine and taurine, which your body can actually use and which no blueberry has ever contained.

So one small portion meets every requirement the wellness aisle has spent thirty years inventing, by the elegant method of your body not having them.

Scientists call a nutrient "essential" when you die without it. There is a list. Fibre isn't on it. Neither is anything that comes in a smoothie.

A second helping provides 200%.



Mike