Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

How long an animal can go without food tells you what it was built to eat, and you can go weeks.

A rabbit that stops eating for a day is a vet emergency. Its gut stalls and its liver starts to fail.

A pony off its food for a few days can flood its own blood with fat and die of it.

A cow needs grass going in around the clock to keep the microbes in her rumen alive.

A lion eats up to 40 kilos at a sitting, then nothing for days.

A wolf can bolt a fifth of its body weight in one meal, then go a fortnight without.

A crocodile can go a year between meals.

A pregnant polar bear digs into the snow and goes up to eight months without eating, giving birth and suckling her cubs on the way.

An emperor penguin father stands through the Antarctic winter with an egg on his feet and eats nothing for about four months.

A human stomach stretches from about a litre to four. A lean human can go about two months without food, living off fat that every other primate barely carries. Hunters in every culture ate until they couldn't move after a kill, and went without until the next one.

The body was built to feast and fast like a predator.

The diet sheet feeds it like a rabbit, a little every few hours, in case it panics.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1968 more than a third of adults in England and Wales did not have a single tooth of their own. In parts of the north a full set of extractions was a twenty-first birthday present, and a bride's father paid to have her teeth out before the wedding.

It was considered a kindness. The teeth were going to go anyway, everybody's did, so you had the lot out young, the good ones along with the bad, and spared your future husband thirty years of dentist's bills. A girl walked down the aisle in new dentures the way she might now have her hair done. If you are over 60 you probably knew the glass on your nan's bedside table.

Nobody thought it strange, because nobody could remember anything else. Britain was getting through about 2lb of sugar a head every week, in tea, jam, biscuits and white bread, and had been since Victoria. Mouths were rotten by twenty. The conclusion the country drew, across three generations, was that British teeth were weak.

Dig up a medieval English churchyard and most of the dead still have theirs.

Faced with a food destroying a body part, a whole nation kept the food and removed the body part, did it to its daughters as a gift, and called the problem hereditary.

We do it with stomachs now.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

American surgeons pull around 10 million wisdom teeth a year, mostly from teenagers. Jay Friedman, a public health dentist who spent three decades fighting the practice, worked out that at least two-thirds of them were doing no harm whatsoever.

The reasoning is an old one. Everybody's go eventually, so have the lot out young, the sound ones with the bad, before they cause trouble. Four at once, usually under a general anaesthetic, followed by a week of soup, ice packs and photographs of chipmunk cheeks. It is so routine that the teenager who keeps all four is the one who gets asked questions.

In 2007 Friedman added it all up and called it a public health hazard. About 5 million Americans go under every year, at a cost of over $3 billion. They lose around 11 million days a year to pain, swelling and missed school or work. Tens of thousands are left with lifelong damage, many with a lip, chin or tongue that never gets its feeling back because the drill clipped a nerve. Most of the pain blamed on wisdom teeth, he found, was caused by the surgery.

Then came the comparison his profession hated most. The share of wisdom teeth that ever turn nasty is about the same as the share of appendixes that turn into appendicitis, and nobody takes every teenager's appendix out just in case. By his estimate the average oral surgeon in America was making about half a million dollars a year from wisdom teeth.

His colleagues called him a traitor. The following year the American Public Health Association came out against pulling healthy wisdom teeth.

Britain had got there first. The very first ruling NICE ever issued, in 2000, told dentists to leave healthy wisdom teeth where they were. America carried on, and still does.

Wisdom teeth arrive on schedule in every mouth. What has changed is the jaw they are meant to fit into. A jaw grows to the work a child's food gives it, and years of soft, sweet, mushy food build one too small for the teeth it was always going to grow. Impacted wisdom teeth are rare in skulls from before farming. In ours they are a rite of passage.

The face shrank to fit the food, and the teeth that no longer fit the face come out at seventeen, as a precaution, at a profit.

Every generation finds a new set of teeth to blame for the menu.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

A human baby is born fatter than a seal pup, and nearly all of that fat is there to feed one organ.

A newborn human is about 15% fat. A newborn baboon is about 3%.

No other primate arrives carrying anything close, and the mother spends the last ten weeks of pregnancy laying most of it down.

The baby's brain takes more than half of everything the baby burns at rest.

Within days of birth a breastfed baby is in ketosis, running that brain partly on fat and building it out of the same material.

Breast milk delivers about half its calories as fat.

It carries more cholesterol, weight for weight, than the mother has been told is safe for her.

It contains almost no starch, because there is nothing in a newborn that could use any.

Every mammal on earth weans its young onto the adult diet of the species.

The human infant spends nine months being fattened and six more on the fattiest drink its mother can make, and is then handed a spoonful of baby rice.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Protein is what you are built from. Fat is what you run on. Your body has never once confused the two.

It shows in what gets stored. A lean adult carries about 100,000 calories of fat, enough for well over a month. They carry about 2,000 of carbohydrate, enough to reach tomorrow lunchtime. They carry no store of protein at all. Every gram of it is on duty as muscle, organ, enzyme or bone, and the only way to burn any is to dismantle something that was working.

It shows in what burning costs. Fat goes into the furnace and comes out as water and breath. Protein has to be stripped first. Every amino acid carries nitrogen, the nitrogen comes off as ammonia, ammonia poisons the brain, and the liver has to turn it into urea before the kidneys can flush it. That line has a top speed. It is reached at roughly a third of your calories, and past it the ammonia backs up.

And it shows in the waste. Up to 30% of the energy in protein is spent just processing it. For fat the figure is about 3%.

One fuel is stored by the month, burns clean and costs almost nothing to use. The other is not stored, leaves toxic ash and loses a quarter of itself on the way in.

Nobody heats a house by burning the walls.

You have spent fifty years being told to cut the coal and eat more bricks.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Charles Darwin spent part of 1833 eating nothing but meat, and wrote down the one detail modern dieters still get wrong.

He was 24 and riding across the Argentine pampas with gauchos, who carried no provisions because provisions were walking about all round them. When they were hungry they killed a cow. For days at a stretch Darwin ate beef, roasted on a stick, and nothing else at all.

He noted that he did not dislike it. He noted that doctors at home sometimes ordered patients onto an all-meat diet and that the patients could hardly bear it, even to save their lives. And yet here were men who touched nothing but beef for months together and were as hard as saddle leather.

He looked for the difference and found it in one line. The gauchos, he wrote, "eat, I observe, a very large proportion of fat".

This was not a squeamish observer. At Cambridge he had belonged to a dining society devoted to eating animals unknown to the English table, which disbanded after an elderly brown owl. On the voyage he ate puma, armadillo and giant tortoise, and got halfway through a small ostrich before realising it was a species new to science and posting the leftovers to London.

He took the finches home, and in time the theory. The dietary finding he left on the pampas, in a travel book, where it has sat for 190 years while lean-meat diets fail in exactly the way he described.

The gauchos never read it. They carried on.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Pork is not a red meat, and I am tired of it turning up to the meetings.

It knows it isn't. In 1987 the American pork industry spent millions on a slogan telling the world that pork was the other white meat. Their words. On billboards. They looked at the pig, looked at the chicken, and said: that's us, we're with him.

Then the red meat started getting the good press again, and suddenly pork is at the door in a borrowed jacket explaining that technically, on a myoglobin basis, it has always been one of the lads.

Cook a pork chop. Look at it. It is the colour of a hotel towel.

Red meat is a ruminant. It ate grass for two years, ran it through four stomachs, and built fat so stable it will sit on your worktop for a month. A pig has one stomach, eats what a bin eats, and stores it as received. Feed a pig soya and you get soya with a tail.

And this is where it stops being funny. Every study that convicts "red and processed meat" has put a ribeye in the dock next to a gas-station hot dog and a ham sandwich, and read out one verdict for all three. Beef has been doing pork's time for forty years.

I like bacon. Bacon is welcome. Bacon is there for morale.

But it comes in through the white meat entrance, with the chicken, and it does not get to sit at the top table.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

You have never eaten a chicken. You have eaten a feed bag in the shape of one.

A chicken has one stomach and six weeks to live. A pig has one stomach and six months. Neither has anywhere to send what it eats except straight into itself, so that is where it goes. Corn oil in, corn oil on. Soya in, soya on. The fat on a chicken thigh or a pork belly is a printed receipt for the cheapest ration the mill could mix, and it carries five to ten times the seed fat of anything that ever grazed.

Rubbish in, rubbish out, and then onto a plate with a heart logo.

A ruminant has a quality department. Before a mouthful of anything reaches the animal, it spends two days in the rumen, a warm vat the size of a bathtub holding more microbes than there have ever been people.

They take plant fat apart and harden it.

They build B12 from scratch, which no plant and no pig has ever managed.

They turn grass, which has nothing in it you could live on, into the protein that ends up as steak.

They dismantle a list of plant poisons that would put you in bed for a week.

Then the animal eats the microbes.

A cow lives on a private herd she keeps in her own belly. The grass is what she feeds them. So is the grain, when there is any, and they deal with it the same way. Fifty million years of development, and the whole system exists to make sure that what went in at the front has no say in what comes out as meat.

The pig hands you what it was handed. The chicken does the same, faster, and gets called the healthy option.

The ruminant hands you beef. Every time. Whatever was in the trough.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1957 New York's most famous diet doctor signed up 1,100 men to prove that swapping butter for corn oil prevents heart attacks. He was dead of a blood clot within four years, and the men on his diet died faster than the men who ignored it.

Norman Jolliffe ran nutrition for the city's health department and had written the bestselling diet book in America. He called his recruits the Anti-Coronary Club. They were businessmen in their forties and fifties, and they pledged themselves to what he named the Prudent Diet: beef, lamb and pork cut to four small meals a week, butter out, margarine in, eggs rationed, and at least an ounce of corn oil every day, taken off a spoon if necessary.

The newspapers loved it. The club's cholesterol fell. Its blood pressure fell. Its waistlines fell. The city published the numbers at intervals, and each time the headline said that diet had been linked to fewer heart attacks.

Jolliffe himself did not see the end. He died in 1961, aged 59, of a thrombosis.

The final count came out in 1966. Among the men on the Prudent Diet there had been 26 deaths. Among the control group, eating as New Yorkers ate, there had been 6. Eight of the club had died of heart attacks. Of the controls, none.

The authors noted these figures in the body of the paper and concluded that the diet had successfully improved the men's risk factors.

It was adopted, more or less whole, as the advice for the nation.

They called it the Prudent Diet. The prudent ones were in the control group.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Vet: "He's diabetic. We see it constantly in indoor cats on dry food."

Owner: "What's wrong with dry food?"

Vet: "It's a third to a half starch. He's a carnivore. He's almost no machinery for it."

Owner: "So what do I do?"

Vet: "Take the starch out. Meat, plenty of protein, some fat, hardly any carbohydrate. A good share of them come off insulin altogether within a few months."

Owner: "Off it. As in cured."

Vet: "We say remission. The cat says nothing and stops drinking the bath."

Owner: "Funny. I'm type 2 myself."

Vet: "And what did they tell you?"

Owner: "Base every meal on starchy carbohydrates. Wholegrain where possible. Metformin, and see how we go."

Vet: "And how do you go?"

Owner: "Up a dose every couple of years."

Vet: "Mm."

Owner: "Could I not just eat what you've prescribed him?"

Vet: "I'm only licensed to give sensible advice to patients with a tail."

Owner: "So he gets the species-appropriate diet and I get the cereal."

Vet: "He's also not allowed out after dark. It evens up."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

An egg is the best thing a chicken will ever do, and it still inherits the chicken's problem.

A hen has one stomach and no filter, so whatever is in the feed is in the yolk.

Feed her corn and soya in a shed and a large egg carries about a gram of linoleic acid.

Let her scratch for grass and insects and it carries about half that.

A tablespoon of sunflower oil carries nine.

A portion of chips fried in it carries as much as ten eggs.

So three eggs a day is not where your omega-6 is coming from, unless you fry them in the bottle.

The pan was always a bigger problem than the hen.

The yolk is the prize: choline, vitamins A, D and K2, DHA, and the cholesterol your body makes its hormones from.

The white is the security system, built to stop bacteria reaching the yolk, and it is armed.

It carries a protein that locks up biotin, another that blocks your digestive enzymes, and the second most common food allergen in children.

Gym culture spent thirty years binning the prize and drinking the security system.

Plenty of people who feel off on a meat diet, and blame the meat, turn out to be reacting to the egg white.

So buy the pastured ones if it is easy, cook them in butter, and favour the yolk.

And never let an egg sit in a steak's seat. It is the best thing in the bird aisle. The bird aisle is still the second division.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In the winter of 1857 a column of the United States Army ate 5 to 6lb of meat per man per day and wasted away on it.

The army was stuck at Fort Bridger, in what is now Wyoming, with its supply trains burned and its animals dying. Captain Randolph Marcy was told to take about 65 men over the Rocky Mountains to New Mexico and come back with mules. It was late November. The guide was a mountain man called Jim Baker.

The snow in the passes was chest deep. The men took turns breaking a trench through it so the animals could follow. The rations had been packed for a shorter trip, and they ran out with eighteen days still to go.

So they did what anybody does in a blizzard with a string of pack animals. They ate the string.

Horse first, then colt, then mule. Every one of those animals had been starving for weeks, and a starving animal burns its own fat to stay on its feet. What was left was red muscle on a frame. There was plenty of it. Marcy, a careful officer who wrote everything down, put it at 5 to 6lb a man, every day.

A modern gym would call that an excellent week. Two and a half kilos of the leanest meat on earth, no carbs, and more protein than a bodybuilder would dare post.

The men got thinner. They got weaker by the day. By the twelfth day on unlimited meat they could barely work, and Marcy recorded that the whole party was "continually craving for fat meat".

The word he chose was fat. They were eating until they could hold no more, and what sixty-odd soldiers dreamed about with their stomachs full was the one thing a starved mule does not carry.

Lean meat is building material. The liver can only clear so much of it in a day, and past that point it stops being food and becomes a disposal problem. A body hauling itself through snow needs something to burn, and those mules had already burned theirs.

They reached the settlements in January. Marcy went on to be Inspector General of the Army, and in 1859 the War Department published his account in a handbook for wagon trains heading west, so that nobody else would have to learn it from the inside of a mule.

The United States government put it in print 167 years ago: lean meat on its own will bring a soldier down inside a fortnight.

The supermarket now charges extra for meat in exactly that condition.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Friend: "So you only eat meat."

Me: "And milk."

Friend: "Meat and milk. Nothing else."

Me: "Butter."

Friend: "No veg, no bread, no fruit."

Me: "No."

Friend: "For six years."

Me: "Yes."

Friend: "Right. What about dessert?"

Me: "What about it?"

Friend: "What do you have for dessert?"

Me: "I've just said no bread and no fruit."

Friend: "Yeah, but for pudding."

Me: "You think there's a break in the rules at about eight o'clock."

Friend: "Everyone has something after."

Me: "Milk."

Friend: "That's a drink."

Me: "It's sweet, it's cold and it comes after the meat. That's a pudding."

Friend: "Not even at Christmas?"

Me: "More milk."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In December 1952 a young New Zealand writer was days away from a lobotomy, with her mother's signature already on the consent form. The operation was cancelled only because the hospital superintendent happened to read in his newspaper that her first book had won the country's top literary prize. She had never had the illness they were treating.

Janet Frame was a shy, red-haired teacher's college student from a poor railway family in Otago. In 1945, at 21, she had a breakdown, and within weeks she was committed to Seacliff Mental Hospital outside Dunedin and diagnosed with schizophrenia. She looked the condition up in a textbook and found it described as a slow, incurable deterioration of the mind. She spent most of the next eight years being proved right by the people treating her.

Over those years she was given more than 200 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, unmodified, with no anaesthetic and no muscle relaxant. She said later that it shredded her memory. In between she wrote. A friend gathered her stories and got them published in 1951, as The Lagoon, while she was still a patient.

By late 1952 the doctors had decided the next step was a prefrontal leucotomy, cutting the connections at the front of her brain to make her calmer. Her mother, told it was for the best, signed. Janet counted down the days.

Then the superintendent, Dr Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, came onto the ward holding a newspaper. The Lagoon had won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. He told her he had decided she should stay as she was. The operation was cancelled.

In 1957, at the Maudsley Hospital in London, a team of psychiatrists examined her properly and told her she had never had schizophrenia. They said she should never have been put in a mental hospital at all, and that most of what was wrong with her by then had been caused by her time on the wards.

She went on to become New Zealand's greatest novelist. Her autobiography became An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion's film. She received the Order of New Zealand, the country's highest honour, and was talked about for the Nobel Prize. She died in 2004, at 79, with her mind intact.

The women in the beds around her at Seacliff had no book in the newspaper.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1934 a team of New York doctors looked down the throats of a thousand eleven-year-olds and found that 61% had already had their tonsils taken out. The children who still had theirs went to a group of physicians, who recommended surgery for nearly half of them. The ones they passed went to a second group of doctors, who recommended surgery for nearly half of those too.

The doctors weren't finding sick tonsils. They were finding tonsils.

For half a century, taking them out was simply what happened to children. The theory was that tonsils harboured hidden infection and were better gone, so out they came, the healthy along with the swollen. In Rochester, New York, between 1919 and 1921, school buses ferried around 15,000 children to free weekend tonsil clinics paid for by George Eastman of Kodak. When the clinic's own doctor followed the children up for ten years, he found the operation had protected them from nothing it was meant to.

In Britain in 1938, a government medical officer, Alison Glover, found that whether a schoolchild lost their tonsils depended less on their throat than on which district they lived in and which doctor they saw. In America a paediatrician called Harry Bakwin counted around 80 children a year dying under anaesthetic, and the operations kept climbing until they peaked at 1.4 million in 1959.

Tonsils are lumps of immune tissue packed with white blood cells, sitting at the entrance to the throat to catch whatever comes in.

A whole generation had its guards on the gate removed to be on the safe side. The doctors who did it slept very well.



Mike