Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

Every drug on the shelf comes with a sentence, and the sentence is always true. The rest of the sentence got left in the car.

"A statin lowers your risk of a heart attack by a third."

A third of three. Take it for three years with 99 other people and one of you is spared. The rest get thighs that ache on the stairs, a memory that mislays names, and one in 250 of you leaves with diabetes and a second prescription.

"An antidepressant is clinically proven to treat depression."

By about 2 points on a 52-point scale, which is below the regulator's own line for noticeable. It takes your sex drive, adds a stone, and gives you electric shocks behind the eyes the week you try to stop. So you don't.

"The weight-loss jab takes off 15% of your body weight."

It does. Nearly half of it is muscle. The face goes first, then the appetite, then the gallbladder in a few. Stop the needle and two-thirds of the fat is back inside a year. The muscle stays gone.

"The osteoporosis tablet halves your risk of a hip fracture."

From 2 in 100 to 1 in 100 over three years, and only if you had already broken something. Taken bolt upright for half an hour so it does not burn your throat. Every so often a thigh bone, never allowed to rebuild, snaps on a flat pavement.

"Lowering your blood pressure further protects your heart."

Two fewer events per 100 people over three years. In exchange, fainting at the sink, falls on the landing and kidneys quietly damaged, all to push an 80-year-old down to a number worked out on people half his age.

"A daily aspirin protects your heart."

One heart attack prevented for every serious bleed caused. The company calls that protection. The man on the ward with the bleed has a shorter word for it.

Not one sentence in quotes above is false. Not one of them was the whole sentence.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Beef has spent 2026 at record prices, and the last government that tried to make its people swallow a one-third rise in the price of meat overnight ended up shooting them.

America's beef herd is at a 75-year low and ground beef set a record price this spring. People grumble at the counter, buy a little less and carry on, because meat is the one thing nobody gives up quietly.

Nikita Khrushchev found that out in 1962.

Five years earlier he had promised the Soviet people they would catch up with America and overtake it in meat, milk and butter per head. It did not happen. So on 31 May 1962 the state announced that from the next morning meat would cost 30% more and butter 25%.

At the electric locomotive works in Novocherkassk, in southern Russia, the timing could not have been worse. Management had just cut the piece rates, so the same men were now earning less and paying more in the same week.

On the morning of 1 June a group of workers stood in the yard asking what exactly they were supposed to live on. The factory director, a man called Kurochkin, came over to answer them. A woman happened to walk past carrying pies. If you can't afford pies with meat, he told them, eat ones with liver.

By the evening 5,000 workers were on strike and the main railway line from Moscow to the south was blocked. Overnight, Moscow sent soldiers, and members of the ruling Presidium flew down to take charge.

On 2 June the workers marched into town, their wives and children with them, and filled the square in front of the Party headquarters. The demands were not complicated. Meat, butter and a pay rise.

The troops opened fire. The official count was 26 dead and dozens wounded. The bodies were taken away and buried in secret in other towns. Afterwards more than 100 people were convicted, and seven were shot by firing squad.

Then the state made it disappear. For 27 years the Soviet press did not mention it. The dead were only dug up and given a proper funeral in 1992, after the country that killed them had ceased to exist.

The price of meat is the oldest opinion poll there is, and governments that price their people out of the butcher's always get an answer.

Every one of them also seems to have a Kurochkin on hand with an alternative. In Novocherkassk the men were offered offal, and they went out into the square instead.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

A British girl in 1960 left school able to roast a joint, render the dripping, make a suet crust and bone a fish. Her granddaughter was taught to design the box a pizza comes in.

It was called domestic science, and it was on the timetable from the 1870s. Once a week you carried your ingredients in on the bus in a wicker basket with a tea towel over the top. A woman in a white overall, who frightened everybody, taught you the lot.

- How to choose a cheap cut and make it tender
- How to make stock from the bones
- How to use up the cold joint on Monday
- How to feed a family of 5 for a week on a wage

The boys were next door doing woodwork, and went home to be fed by someone who had passed the course.

In 1990 the National Curriculum abolished it. Cooking was folded into a new subject called design and technology, alongside plastics and electronics. Pupils no longer cooked a meal. They "developed a food product". They surveyed their classmates on preferred toppings, drew the packaging, and wrote an evaluation.

Thousands of school kitchens were stripped out, since nobody needed an oven to draw a box.

That was 36 years ago. The first children through it are now the parents, standing in a supermarket with no idea what to do with a shoulder of lamb, and being told that their weight is a failure of willpower.

It was a decision. A country that had taught every girl to turn a carcass into a week of dinners chose to teach her children to be customers.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

There are 195 countries on earth, and 193 of them have decided that a drug company should not be allowed to sell you a prescription medicine during the football.

The other 2 are the United States and New Zealand.

In Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Australia, the advert is illegal.

In America it is over $10 billion a year, and the companies write it off against their tax.

Three of the five biggest spenders on American television are drug makers.

The advert shows a couple laughing on a beach while a calm voice reads out liver failure, suicidal thoughts and sudden death.

Then it tells you to ask your doctor.

Everywhere else the doctor decides what you need and tells you. In America the advert decides, and the doctor is where you go to collect.

In the 1990s the regulator sent out hundreds of warning letters a year over misleading drug adverts.

In 2024 it sent none.

The news programme that might have looked into this is brought to you by the same companies, every 8 minutes, between the stories.

Americans take more prescription drugs than any people who have ever lived.

They are also the only ones who were asked nicely, 16 times an evening.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The most addictive substance in Britain is sold at child height at every till in the country, and the proof is everything nobody has ever done for a steak.

Nobody has ever hidden a ribeye in the glovebox.

Nobody has ever eaten a whole leg of lamb standing at the fridge at midnight and lied about it in the morning.

Nobody has ever driven to a petrol station at 11pm for mince.

Nobody has ever had a headache lift the second the butter arrived.

Nobody has ever eaten a pork chop they did not want because it was there.

Nobody has ever promised to start the diet on Monday because of a sausage.

Nobody has ever hidden the wrappers from a joint of beef.

Nobody has ever needed a support group for cheese.

Half the country has done every one of those things for a food, and the food is sold in multipacks, at pocket-money prices, with a cartoon on the front, on the shelf a seven-year-old can reach while the parent is paying.

Meat satisfies. Sugar recruits. One of them has a marketing budget, and it is not the one that fills you up.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

When Ellen Wilkinson fought the Treasury for free school milk in 1946, she had a tape measure on her side. Twenty years earlier a doctor had tested milk on 600 boys in a children's home, and the result was not close.

In 1922 Harold Corry Mann was given a home full of boys outside London and a question from the Medical Research Council. The boys were already on a diet the experts called adequate. Would anything added to it make them grow?

He split them into houses and gave each house one extra thing, every day, for a year or more. Then he measured them.

- Nothing extra: 1.84 inches taller, 3.85lb heavier
- A pint of whole milk: 2.63 inches taller, 6.98lb heavier

The milk boys grew over 40% faster in height and put on nearly twice the weight, on top of a diet that was supposed to be complete.

He noted something that was not in the brief. The milk boys had fewer chilblains and fewer colds, and the house masters complained they were harder to control. They had more go in them.

He also tried a ration of watercress. The watercress boys grew less than the boys given nothing.

That report sat in Whitehall for 20 years. It was the reason a child could buy a third of a pint for a halfpenny in the 1930s, if his mother had the halfpenny. Wilkinson had grown up among the ones whose mothers did not. She knew what the numbers meant for a street like hers, and she got the charge abolished.

The Treasury said the country could not afford it. She had 600 boys who said it could not afford anything else.



Mike

 

[JVG]

A British girl in 1960 left school able to roast a joint, render the dripping, make a suet crust and bone a fish. Her granddaughter was taught to design the box a pizza comes in.

It was called domestic science, and it was on the timetable from the 1870s. Once a week you carried your ingredients in on the bus in a wicker basket with a tea towel over the top. A woman in a white overall, who frightened everybody, taught you the lot.

- How to choose a cheap cut and make it tender
- How to make stock from the bones
- How to use up the cold joint on Monday
- How to feed a family of 5 for a week on a wage

The boys were next door doing woodwork, and went home to be fed by someone who had passed the course.

In 1990 the National Curriculum abolished it. Cooking was folded into a new subject called design and technology, alongside plastics and electronics. Pupils no longer cooked a meal. They "developed a food product". They surveyed their classmates on preferred toppings, drew the packaging, and wrote an evaluation.

Thousands of school kitchens were stripped out, since nobody needed an oven to draw a box.

That was 36 years ago. The first children through it are now the parents, standing in a supermarket with no idea what to do with a shoulder of lamb, and being told that their weight is a failure of willpower.

It was a decision. A country that had taught every girl to turn a carcass into a week of dinners chose to teach her children to be customers.



Mike

Mijn mama heeft nog huishoudschool gevolgd,dat zal zo rond 1960 zijn geweest.

 

[JVG]

There are 195 countries on earth, and 193 of them have decided that a drug company should not be allowed to sell you a prescription medicine during the football.

The other 2 are the United States and New Zealand.

In Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Australia, the advert is illegal.

In America it is over $10 billion a year, and the companies write it off against their tax.

Three of the five biggest spenders on American television are drug makers.

The advert shows a couple laughing on a beach while a calm voice reads out liver failure, suicidal thoughts and sudden death.

Then it tells you to ask your doctor.

Everywhere else the doctor decides what you need and tells you. In America the advert decides, and the doctor is where you go to collect.

In the 1990s the regulator sent out hundreds of warning letters a year over misleading drug adverts.

In 2024 it sent none.

The news programme that might have looked into this is brought to you by the same companies, every 8 minutes, between the stories.

Americans take more prescription drugs than any people who have ever lived.

They are also the only ones who were asked nicely, 16 times an evening.



Mike

Reclame van pilletjes en siroopjes is hier schering en inslag op de TV in Spanje.