Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

Doctor: So, based on the guidelines and the WHO stuff, I’d recommend cutting back on the red meat—especially the processed stuff like bacon and sausage. It’s linked to higher risk of heart disease and some cancers.

Patient: Linked how? From actual trials, or just those big observational studies?
Doctor: Mostly the cohort studies. People who eat more red meat show higher rates of cardiovascular events and certain cancers. Usually something like a 10–20% relative risk bump at the high end.

Patient: Those are just associations though, right? The people eating more red meat also tend to smoke more, sit around more, drink more, and eat more junk overall. How cleanly can you separate that? And has any real randomized trial shown that cutting red meat actually prevents heart attacks, strokes, or death?

Doctor: The trials are pretty thin. Most of them just look at cholesterol or blood pressure, not the hard outcomes. The Women’s Health Initiative cut red meat a bit as part of a low-fat diet and basically saw no clear benefit on mortality.

Patient: Right—so the one big trial that actually reduced red meat didn’t move the needle on dying from heart disease or overall mortality? And the shorter trials on lipids and blood pressure are mostly neutral depending on what you’re comparing it to?
Doctor: Yeah. Versus plant proteins you sometimes get a small LDL difference. Versus other animal proteins it’s often a wash.

Patient: And that IARC thing that put processed meat in the same category as cigarettes? One of the actual panelists—a USDA scientist—said it was the most frustrating experience of his career. Weak observational data, ignored trials that didn’t support it, and a lot of people who already had their minds made up.

Doctor: That process has gotten a lot of criticism. The risks were modest and the data weren’t consistent.

Patient: So if I’m eating steak a few times a week, staying active, not smoking, and not living on ultra-processed food… is there solid evidence that cutting back more is going to meaningfully lower my chance of dying from heart disease or cancer?

Doctor: You know what, screw it—eat as much steak as you want. The evidence to avoid it is paper thin, but I have to tell you to avoid it so I can keep my job. Think I’m gonna have steak tonight too!



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1928 a Chicago paediatrician let babies choose their own dinner from 34 foods, and for six years not one of them chose the way the pamphlet says.

Clara Davis took fifteen infants just weaned, and put a tray in front of them at every meal.

Beef, lamb, chicken, liver, kidney, brains, bone marrow, fish, eggs, milk, bananas, oats, carrots, peas, cabbage, salt. Nothing processed. No sugar.

Nobody steered. The nurse held the spoon, the baby pointed.

One boy ate seven eggs a day for a stretch. Another lived on bananas for a fortnight and then would not look at one.

They chewed bone marrow. They drank the beef juice. They pushed the greens round the tray.

One baby arrived with rickets. She put cod liver oil on the tray and left it there. He drank it, unprompted, until the rickets healed, and then never touched it again.

Six years. Not one case of stomach trouble. Not one deficiency. Visitors said they had never seen healthier children.

The doctors who examined them wrote it up as the wisdom of the body.

Nobody had taught these children that the yolk was bad or the marrow was rich or the cabbage was the healthy part.

Left alone with the food, a one-year-old built itself a diet heavy in the animal and ate the plants as a side when the mood took it.

The experiment is almost a century old. The pamphlet is still telling his mother to start with the carrot.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Every compound sold to you as the health benefit of a plant is a weapon the plant built to make an animal stop eating it.

Broccoli keeps two chemicals in separate compartments and mixes them only when a leaf is bitten, releasing a mustard oil to drive the caterpillar off. It is sold as sulforaphane.

The chilli makes capsaicin so a mammal's mouth burns and it leaves the fruit for the birds, who cannot feel it. It is sold as a metabolism booster.

The coffee bush makes caffeine to paralyse the insects chewing its leaves. It is sold as an antioxidant.

The grapevine makes resveratrol to fight off fungus. It was sold as the French secret and an anti-ageing pill, and the trials came back flat.

The red kidney bean makes a lectin so potent that four or five raw beans will empty you from both ends. It is sold as fibre and protein.

The potato makes solanine to poison whatever digs it up. In 1979 it made 78 schoolboys in south London ill.

The clover makes oestrogen-like compounds, and in the 1940s grazing on it left whole flocks of Western Australian ewes unable to lamb. The same family of compounds is in your soya.

The cassava root makes cyanide, and where it is eaten badly prepared, children are paralysed by a disease called konzo. It is sold as gluten-free flour.

Every one of those plants is trying to get you to leave, and the health shop has bottled the eviction notice.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

A diet that stopped children's seizures was found at the Mayo Clinic in 1921, and it took the director of Airplane! to drag it back out of the textbook seventy years later.

Doctors had noticed for centuries that fasting quietened epilepsy.

Russell Wilder at the Mayo Clinic worked out why. A body without food runs on ketones, made from fat. So he built a diet that kept the body there while still feeding it. Mostly fat, some protein, almost no carbohydrate.

He called it the ketogenic diet, and for years it was a standard treatment for children with epilepsy.

Then the anti-seizure drugs arrived, and the diet was quietly dropped. It took work to run and nobody sold it.

1993. Jim Abrahams, who made Airplane!, has a baby son called Charlie having seizures every day. The drugs fail one after another.

Abrahams finds the diet in a library book and gets Charlie to Johns Hopkins, one of the few hospitals still using it.

Within days the seizures stop.

Abrahams set up a foundation, made a film about it starring Meryl Streep, and spent the rest of his life asking why nobody had told him.

In 2008 a trial in London finally tested it on children whose epilepsy no drug could control. Four in ten on the diet had their seizures cut by more than half. On usual care, six in a hundred.

A plate of fat beat the pharmacy on the hardest cases in children's medicine.

It is still offered only after at least two drugs have failed.





Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Women have been handed the plant version of every nutrient for fifty years and then told the tiredness is just being a woman.

Told to eat spinach for iron. Spinach iron absorbs at about 2%. The iron in a steak absorbs at up to 35%.

Told to take flax for the omega-3. The body turns a few percent of it into the fat the brain actually uses. A mackerel arrives with it done.

Told to swap the milk for oat. The milk was where the iodine was, and the thyroid runs on iodine.

Told to get B12 from nutritional yeast. Yeast has none until a factory sprays it on.

Told to get protein from tofu, which has half what a lamb chop carries and none of the fat to use it.

Told to cut the yolk for the cholesterol. The yolk was the choline, and the choline was the baby's brain.

Told to go low fat in 1985 and to count calories in 1995, and the hunger that followed got a diagnosis of its own.

Three women in ten on earth are anaemic. The advice for all three has been a leaf.

Every substitution on that list took the animal off her plate and handed her the deficiency, and then handed her a label for the deficiency.

Hashimoto's. Fibromyalgia. Chronic fatigue. Low mood. Perimenopause, arriving at thirty-eight.

She was never short of a plant. She was short of a cow.

Fifty years of being told to eat like a rabbit, and the fatigue filed under hormones.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Every food a child has ever been bribed to eat is a plant, and every bribe has been an animal or a sugar.

No child has ever been bribed to eat butter.

No child has ever been bribed to eat bacon.

No child has ever been bribed to eat the crackling.

No child has ever been bribed to eat a sausage, a chip fried in dripping, or the skin off the roast chicken.

No child has ever been bribed to drink full-fat milk.

Every child has been bribed to eat broccoli.

Every child has been bribed to eat the sprouts, the cabbage, the spinach, the peas, the swede and whatever that was on the side of the plate on Sundays.

Nobody has ever hidden steak inside a vegetable to get it into a child.

Entire cookbooks exist for hiding vegetables inside cheese.

Three more bites. Finish your greens. No pudding until the plate is clear.

The deal in every kitchen is the same: eat the plant and you may have the thing you actually wanted.

Children have been making this trade for a hundred years and losing every time, because the thing they wanted was the nutrition and the thing they were forced through was the ballast.

No parent has ever said finish your steak and you can have a sprout.



Mike