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[fatsnotbad]

Until about 1985, "I've eaten well today" meant you'd had plenty, and it was said with satisfaction rather than an apology.

A second slice of beef arrived on your plate without you asking for it. A child who said he was still hungry got a dripping sandwich and nobody sighed. A visitor was fed before he was asked what he wanted and sent home with a plate under a tea towel. Being full was the point of the meal, and making sure somebody else was full was the whole of what hospitality meant in a house that had very little else to offer.

The phrase has turned over completely. "I've been good today" now means "I've eaten less." Eating well means a small plate of things successfully avoided, and the person who clears it is expected to look slightly ashamed.

That inversion has a date on it. The calorie became a moral unit in the eighties, when the advice to cut the fat arrived and the counting started, and from then on plenty and virtue were opposites. A woman who put a second slice on your plate in 1965 was looking after you. The same woman doing it in 1995 was undermining you.

What nobody involved understood is that the old kitchen had the mechanism right and the new one had it backwards.

A dinner built on meat and animal fat stops the body asking. The beef, the dripping, the milk pudding, all of it satisfies for hours, which is why a family could sit down at six, be full until morning, and never think about food in between. Plenty at the table produced restraint everywhere else without anybody trying.

The new plate does the reverse. Take the fat off, put the flour and the sugar on, and a person is hungry again by nine, and now the hunger is his fault, and the answer is to be better at ignoring it.

So a country that was fed and content became a country that is fed constantly and never satisfied, and it calls the second condition discipline.

Your grandmother never once said she had been good. She said you looked thin and put more on the plate, and she was closer to the science than anybody who has been to her since.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Blood pressure has never once changed. The line on it has moved 6 times, and every time it moved, it moved towards you.

1931: a British physician writes in the BMJ that the greatest danger to a man with high blood pressure is its discovery, because some fool will then try to reduce it.

1937: America's most famous heart doctor calls hypertension a compensatory mechanism that should not be tampered with.

1944: the President's physician reads 186 over 108 and calls it normal for a man of his age. The President is dead within the year.

1950s: the rule of thumb in every surgery is 100 plus your age. At 60, 160 is fine.

1959: the first people to put a number on it are not doctors. They are life insurers, pricing the policy.

1977: the first national committee sits. Treat the bottom number at 105. Below that, use judgement.

1993: the line is redrawn at 140 over 90.

1997: a new shelf appears above normal, called high-normal, and a new floor below it, called optimal, at 120 over 80.

2003: high-normal is renamed prehypertension. 120 over 80 is now a condition. The report says in the same paragraph that it is not a disease and needs no drugs. The disclosures at the foot of the paper list the companies that make the drugs it does not need yet.

2014: the same committee's successor raises the line for the over-60s to 150 over 90. Too many old people on too many pills, it says.

2015: a trial called SPRINT measures blood pressure with an automated cuff in an empty room, a method that reads lower than any nurse in any clinic, and finds lower is better.

2017: on the strength of it, the line drops to 130 over 80 for everyone, including the over-60s the 2014 line had just let off. 31 million Americans go to bed healthy and wake up hypertensive. Prevalence goes from 32% to 46% overnight, and under 45 it doubles.

2019: Britain reads the same trial and keeps 140 over 90, 150 for the over-80s, on the grounds that the lower lines had not been shown to prevent a single event.

2026: the same arm, the same cuff, the same reading of 132 over 84. A patient in Ohio. A well woman in Chester. The Atlantic is the diagnosis.

31 million customers, created in one afternoon, by a vote, and not one of them was measured. Their arteries did not move. The committee did.

A President was healthy at 186. You are a patient at 130. The only organ that changed in 80 years is the one that holds the meeting.



Mike