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

 

[Medusa]

Je tong heeft een receptor voor vlees. Hij detecteert glutamaat en inosinaat, de smaak van een steak, een bouillon en een gerijpte kaas, en hij beloont je voor het vinden ervan.

Je tong heeft een receptor voor vet. Ontdekt in 2015, genoemd oleogustus, en hij vuurt af op druipend vet, merg en room.

Je tong heeft één receptor voor zoet. Hij is gebouwd voor rijp fruit en honing, die een paar weken per jaar arriveerden.

Je tong heeft 25 receptoren voor bitter.

Vijfentwintig. Eén voor elke familie plantengif waar je voorouders van leerden spugen, want bitter is de smaak van een blad dat zichzelf verdedigt.

Elk kind op aarde wijst groenten af zonder dat het geleerd hoeft te worden. Dat zijn de 25 receptoren die precies doen waarvoor ze zijn gebouwd.

De volwassene leert ze te overrulen. Het kost jaren, zout, olie en een saus, en het kind krijgt te horen dat het moeilijk doet.

Eén receptor voor vlees, één voor vet, 25 alarmbellen voor planten, en de hele natie is getraind om door de alarmbellen heen te eten en zich schuldig te voelen over de twee die ja zeggen.

Je tong classificeerde broccoli als gif voordat je een woord had voor een van beide.

 

[fatsnotbad]

Rice paddies heat the planet about as much as every aeroplane in the sky, and nobody has made a documentary about your pilau.

A flooded paddy is a man-made swamp. Under the water, with no oxygen, the same family of microbes that live in a cow's rumen break down plant matter and give off methane. It is a rumen with the cow taken out. Rice accounts for around a tenth of all the methane humans cause, and about 1.5% of all greenhouse gases, which puts it level with global aviation.

The response so far:

- Streaming exposés on rice: none
- Celebrities going rice-free for January: none
- Rice-free Mondays in school canteens: none
- Carbon labels on a bag of basmati: none
- Countries taxing it: none

Denmark, meanwhile, will bill its farmers for every cow and pig from 2030.

The cow's methane comes from grass, which pulled that carbon out of the air last spring, on ground too wet or too steep to plough, and it arrives with beef, milk, leather and a fertilised field. The paddy's methane arrives with a bowl of starch.

The chemistry is identical. One of them is a plant, and plants do not get prosecuted. The climate case against your dinner depends on only ever pointing the instrument at the animal.

Who decided which methane counts?



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

At 220 degrees, nylon melts and runs. At 220 degrees, wool is a jumper.

At 250 degrees, polyester melts and sticks to the skin. At 250 degrees, wool is a jumper.

At 300 degrees, acrylic catches and drips burning plastic. At 300 degrees, wool is a jumper.

At 400 degrees, the fleece is a liquid. At 400 degrees, wool is a jumper.

At 500 degrees, the sofa is on fire. At 500 degrees, wool is a jumper.

At 570 degrees, wool finally chars, puts itself out, and stops.

That is why the seat under you on an aeroplane is wool.

That is why the Royal Navy stopped issuing nylon after 1982, when the men on the Sheffield found out what it does.

That is why a firefighter's station blanket was wool for a hundred years before anyone made an advert about it.

The sheep grows a fire-rated, self-extinguishing, water-shedding fabric on a hill in Wales for nothing.

The market price is below the cost of the haircut.

The replacement is petrol you can wear.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

For 40 years American hospitals fed premature babies soybean oil through a vein, and when a pharmacist found the fix, it took the regulator 14 years to approve it.

A baby born with a damaged gut cannot be fed by mouth. He is kept alive on a drip that carries his entire diet. The fat in that drip, in every American hospital, was an emulsion of soybean oil.

Many of those babies developed liver failure. It was the known price of the treatment. The options were to stop the drip, or to put a newborn on the transplant list.

In 2004 a baby called Charlie was dying of it at Boston Children's Hospital. A pharmacist, Kathleen Gura, and a surgeon, Mark Puder, got permission to import a European product in which the fat came from fish. His liver recovered.

So did the next baby's, and the one after. The hospital had been losing several children a year to death or transplant. It dropped to 1 transplant in 6 years.

The fish emulsion was not approved in America. Each child needed a separate application, and for years the families or the hospital paid for it themselves. Approval finally came on 27 July 2018.

Nobody had given those babies anything poisonous by the standards of the day. They had been given the national dietary advice, intravenously, with nothing else to dilute it.

Soybean oil is still the standard fat in an adult drip.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The vegetable aisle is the newest food in the shop, and parts of it are younger than the people shopping in it.

1587: the first written description of a Brussels sprout

1600: Dutch growers fix the orange carrot. The wild one is a white root the width of a pencil

1720: broccoli reaches England, sold as "Italian asparagus"

1750: the garden strawberry, an accidental French cross between a plant from Chile and one from Virginia

1894: iceberg lettuce, launched from a seed catalogue in Philadelphia

1939: the seedless watermelon, built by a Japanese geneticist. It cannot reproduce

1953: supersweet corn, from a mutation spotted in an Illinois lab

1979: the sugar snap pea, Idaho

1986: the baby carrot, a Californian farmer whittling his rejects in a green bean cutter

1993: Tenderstem broccoli, a Japanese seed company crossing broccoli with Chinese kale

2010: the kalette, a British seed house, 15 years of crossing kale with sprouts

Cut marks on animal bone: 2.6 million years.

Only one of those two diets has ever needed a government campaign to get it eaten.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Drink raw milk in public and you will be asked whether it's safe by the most extraordinary people.

"Is that safe?" From a man holding a vape the colour of antifreeze.

"Is that safe?" From a woman who has just come off a sunbed.

"Is that safe?" From a lad eating petrol station sushi at four in the afternoon.

"Is that safe?" From a colleague on his third energy drink, whose hands are doing something.

"Is that safe?" From a man who reheats rice.

"Is that safe?" From somebody's aunt, over the rim of a large gin, at eleven in the morning, at a christening.

"Is that safe?" From a bloke who drove here on his phone.

"Is that safe?" From a woman injecting herself weekly with something she ordered off a website.

It is milk. It came out of a cow on Tuesday, on a farm I could drive you to, from a herd that gets inspected more often than the restaurant you ate in last night.

People drank it for about ten thousand years before anybody thought to ask.

I appreciate the concern. Mind your sushi.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In every case the company knew first. By decades. In writing.

1924: the makers of leaded petrol lose five workers to lead madness in one plant. Their own scientist calls the product a gift of God. Lead stays in the tank until 2000, and takes a measured slice of IQ off every child born in the century.

1930s: the asbestos company's own doctors find the lung disease and the company settles the lawsuits quietly, with silence clauses, for 40 years.

1953: the tobacco companies meet in New York, read their own research, and set up an institute to manufacture doubt about it. It runs for 44 years.

1961: the chemical company finds its non-stick coating in the blood of its workers and the livers of its rats. It tells no one for 40 years. It is now in the blood of every person on earth.

1965: the sugar industry pays three Harvard men to blame fat. The paper runs in the top journal. The payment is found in a box in 2016.

1966: the maker of PCBs finds dead fish downstream of its plant and writes an internal memo recommending the company say nothing. It is 1977 before they are banned.

1990s: the makers of the opioid know the addiction rate from their own files and tell doctors it is under one percent.

2000s: the makers of a diabetes drug see the heart attacks in their own data and keep selling. 2010 before it is pulled.

The pattern is not a secret conspiracy. It is a filing cabinet. The company knew, the knowledge sat in a drawer, and the consensus outside the building was built on the brochure.

So when the brochure says a seed oil is heart healthy and the trans fat is gone and the formula is complete, ask the only question the last century has ever answered the same way.

What is in the drawer.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Most people who fail on carnivore were never short of meat. They were short of fat, and the fix takes about a week.

Your liver can only process so much protein, roughly a third of your calories. With carbs gone, the other two thirds has to be fat. There is no third option.

Lean meat alone leaves you hungry, cold, tired and dreaming about bread. That's a fuel shortage, and it gets blamed on the diet.

Aim for at least a gram of fat for every gram of protein. Most people feel best at one and a half.

No cut gets there unaided, so add it:

- Butter on every steak, a thick slice, while it rests
- Tallow or dripping stirred through mince
- Double cream in the pan juices
- Egg yolks, runny, as a sauce
- Bone marrow, roasted, eaten with a spoon
- Suet, rendered, for cooking everything else
- The fat cap, eaten, never trimmed

You'll know it's working when you finish a meal and the idea of food simply leaves your head for six hours.

If you're hungry two hours after eating, you didn't need more meat. You needed more butter.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Ask the oldest people on earth what they ate every day, and not one of them says kale.

Supercentenarians on their own daily habit:

- Emma Morano, Italy, 117: three eggs a day, two raw, for 90 years
- Susannah Mushatt Jones, USA, 116: four rashers of bacon each morning
- Maria Branyas, Spain, 117: three yoghurts a day
- Misao Okawa, Japan, 117: mackerel on rice, and sleep
- Violet Brown, Jamaica, 117: fish, mutton and cow foot

Morano added raw minced beef to the eggs, on the advice of a doctor in 1919 who is no longer available for follow-up. She outlived him by some margin. She outlived everybody.

Jones kept a sign in her kitchen that read: bacon makes everything better.

Every one of these women was born before the food pyramid, the low fat yoghurt and the statin, and every one of them outlived the people who designed all three.

No verified human being has reached 115 and credited a wholegrain.

The longevity industry interviews them, photographs them, and goes home to write the book about beans.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

"Burn it off at the gym" is the most profitable sentence in the food industry, and the hunter-gatherers who walk 7 miles a day burn no more calories than an office worker in a swivel chair.

The Hadza of Tanzania hunt on foot, dig tubers and carry everything by hand. Researchers measured their daily energy use precisely, expecting an enormous number.

It was the same as a desk-bound Westerner of the same size.

The body runs a budget. Move more and it quietly spends less elsewhere. You cannot outrun the plate, because the plate is in charge.

Now look at who has been keenest on the other theory:

- Coca-Cola, who gave $1.5 million to scientists to tell the public to worry less about diet and more about exercise
- Every cereal box with a cyclist on it
- Every chocolate bar sponsoring a fun run

If weight is your fault for not moving, it can never be their fault for what is in the can.

The gym is for building muscle and bone. It does that superbly. It has never once been a place to pay off a fizzy drink.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Activist: "Beef is the least vegan thing on the planet."

Farmer: "What did he eat?"

Activist: "Who?"

Farmer: "The bullock. What's been in him for two years."

Activist: "Grass."

Farmer: "Grass, clover, a bit of hedge when he can reach it. Two years of nothing but plants. He's the strictest vegan on this farm and he's never once mentioned it."

Activist: "That's not the point."

Farmer: "It's the only point. You eat a plant and keep a tenth of what's in it. He's got four stomachs and a tank of bacteria that strips the lot and hands it back as fat and marbling. He's a plant with the hard work done."

Activist: "You're twisting it."

Farmer: "Your lunch was a bean that got boiled, a leaf that got washed and a tablet to replace what neither of them had. His was a hillside. One of you got the nutrition out of the plants, and it wasn't the one with the lanyard."

Activist: "Eating him isn't vegan."

Farmer: "It's the most vegan thing you'll ever do. A steak is six tonnes of grass with the roughage taken out. You've been eating the roughage and calling it the principle."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Butter was eaten for 8,000 years without a single recorded complaint. Then a committee looked at it for an afternoon and decided it was trying to kill us.

6500 BC: The first farmers are churning. Their pots are still greasy.

1700 BC: The Irish bury butter in bogs by the barrel, as savings. Nobody has ever buried a tub of margarine in the hope of finding it later.

AD 77: Pliny sneers that butter is the food of barbarians. The barbarians are a head taller than Pliny.

1911: Americans eat 18lb of butter each a year. Heart attacks are so rare that doctors write them up as curiosities.

1961: The American Heart Association tells the nation to swap butter for vegetable oil. No trial has tested this. They are quite sure.

1984: Time magazine does a frowning face out of 2 fried eggs and a rasher of bacon. Britain makes the advice official the same year.

1997: Butter eating in America hits 4lb a head. The public has done exactly as it was told.

Obesity has more than doubled. Diabetes is up sevenfold. The fat that took butter's place came out of a seed, by way of a refinery.

2014: The largest review ever done finds no link between saturated fat and heart disease. Time runs a new cover. It says Eat Butter.

2016: A study of 636,000 people finds butter does nothing to the heart and slightly lowers the risk of diabetes.

So the experts took 53 years, several billion pounds and a generation of other people's arteries to catch up with a Bronze Age Irishman and a hole in a bog.

Nobody was sacked. The retraction ran in a medical journal. The accusation had run on the front of every tub.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Medicine's "deadliest" cholesterol gene did nothing at all to the people who carried it in the 1800s.

Familial hypercholesterolaemia gives you sky-high LDL from birth. It is the textbook proof that cholesterol kills: the gene raises the number, the number blocks the artery, case closed.

Dutch researchers traced one family carrying the gene back through the civil registers to a single couple, and counted how long each generation lived against their neighbours of the same years.

- 1830 to 1869: carriers died at about 60% of the normal rate
- 1870 to 1904: about the same as everyone else
- 1905 to 1934: pulling ahead
- 1935 to 1964: nearly double

Same gene. Same family. Same cholesterol, generation after generation. For 70 years it cost them nothing, and in an age when infection was what filled the churchyard it looks a lot like a favour.

Then the 20th century arrived and the identical gene began killing them.

A gene cannot change its mind. Something else walked into those Dutch kitchens between 1900 and 1935, and it turned a harmless number into a fatal one.

The Dutch, as it happens, spent exactly those years building the world's margarine industry.

Cardiology looked at this family and chose to treat the number.



Mike