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.

 

[fatsnotbad]

"Milk makes mucus." Every mother in Britain has said it, every nurse has nodded at it, and the one time anybody tested it they had to infect 60 people with a cold to find out.

Adelaide, 1990. Researchers took 60 healthy adults, put rhinovirus up their noses on purpose, and then had them drink anything from no milk at all to 11 glasses a day for 10 days. Every tissue used was collected, bagged and weighed. The question was simple: do the milk drinkers produce more?

No. Not an ounce. The amount of mucus coming out of a nose had no relationship to the amount of milk going into the mouth, at zero glasses or at 11.

So why does it feel like it does? The same team did the follow-up. They gave people milk, and separately a soy drink made to the same thickness and mouthfeel, and the soy drinkers reported exactly the same coating in the throat, the same need to swallow, the same thick feeling. Milk is an emulsion of fat in water. It coats your mouth. Your saliva goes thick with it for a minute. That is the entire experience, and a glass of cocoa-flavoured soy produces it without a cow being involved.

The myth is older than the stethoscope. It is in a 12th-century treatise on asthma, and it has survived 800 years of being wrong because a sensation in the throat is easier to believe than a weighed tissue.

So the real thing is blamed for a feeling a fake can reproduce, and the advice is to swap one for the other.

You have a cold because you have a cold. The milk is innocent, and it was cleared in a laboratory in 1990 with 60 witnesses and a set of scales.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Cholesterol is the substance a mother loads into her milk for her baby, and the substance a doctor spends your whole adulthood trying to take out of you.

What they told you it was:

- Grease in the pipes
- The reason for the heart attack
- Something to measure, fear and medicate
- Bad if it's over the line
- Worse if you're old

What it actually is:

- The raw material for testosterone, oestrogen and cortisol
- The stuff your skin turns into vitamin D
- A quarter of it is in your brain
- Breast milk carries about 10 times more of it than formula
- A mother's milk keeps its cholesterol steady whatever she eats

Nature won't let a mother's diet touch the cholesterol in her milk. It mattered that much. Then the child grows up and a leaflet tells him to fear it.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The woman who taught America to cook was 6ft 2, used butter by the pound on public television for 40 years, and outlived most of the people who told her to stop.

Julia Child was born in California in 1912. She could not cook until she was 36. Then her husband was posted to Paris, she ate a sole fried in butter in Rouen, and that was that.

If you were in America in the 1960s, you remember her. Black and white, a voice like a trombone, dropping things and carrying on. She put a whole chicken on the board, rubbed it with butter, and told you to do the same. Cream went into the sauce. The fat stayed on the roast.

Then the 1980s arrived and the country was ordered onto margarine, skimmed milk and chicken breast with the skin off. Cookery writers fell into line overnight. Julia would not. She said the fear of food was doing more harm than the food. She carried on with the butter, in front of the cameras, while the nutritionists wrote to the network.

She was mocked for it as a relic.

She worked into her 80s, lived on her own, and died in 2004, 2 days short of her 92nd birthday.

The people who built the low fat pyramid have been quietly taking it apart ever since. This January the American government finally turned it upside down.

She did not live to see herself proved right. She just went on cooking as if it had never been in doubt.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Until 1980 there were no dates on food in Britain. Whether something was fit to eat was decided by the person about to cook it, using her nose.

You will have watched your mother do it. The lid off the milk and a sniff. A thumb pressed into the joint. The fish held up and looked in the eye. She knew, in about 2 seconds, and she was never wrong.

It was a skill, handed from mother to daughter over the sink, and it ran deeper than checking for bad.

- Beef was meant to be dark, having hung at the butcher's for 3 or 4 weeks
- A pheasant hung by the neck until it was properly high
- Mutton was kept until it had flavour
- Milk on the turn was not thrown out, it was baked with
- Cheese with a bloom on it had the bloom cut off

Meat that has been aged is more tender and tastes of more. Every butcher and every cook understood that time, handled properly, improves an animal.

In 1980 date marks became law. The printed number was only ever the manufacturer's cautious guess, but within a generation it had replaced the judgement entirely. Nobody was taught to sniff, because the packet would tell you.

So now a steak that is at its very best goes in the bin because it is Thursday. Bright red beef, barely a week from the abattoir, is preferred because it looks fresh. British households throw away millions of tonnes of food a year, much of it unopened.

For the whole of human history the final safety check on dinner was a mother's nose. We replaced it with a stamp, and trust the stamp over our own senses.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

American law still defines ground beef as up to 30% fat. That figure was never a warning. It was simply a description of what came out of the grinder.

A butcher breaks down a carcass into steaks and joints. What is left over is the trim: the ends, the flank, the pieces between the ribs, with the fat still on them. Put that through a mincer as it comes and you get something very close to 70 parts lean to 30 parts fat. Nobody designed it. That is what a cow is.

So for most of the last century there was one kind. You asked for a pound of mince, or a pound of hamburger, and he ground it in front of you. It went into the pan with nothing added, because it brought its own fat. What ran out went into the gravy, or into a cup by the stove.

Then fat became the enemy, and the labels appeared. Lean. Extra lean. 5%.

To make those, somebody has to stand at the block and cut the fat away before grinding. You are then charged more per pound for the work of removing a third of the food.

And think about what was removed. The fat is where the flavour is, where the vitamins are carried, and where most of the energy is. Take it out and you have a pan of dry crumbs that will not brown, so you pour in a spoonful of seed oil to get it started.

The customer pays extra to have the beef fat taken out, then pays again to put rapeseed fat in.

Your grandmother's mince was 30% fat because nobody had thought of a reason to interfere with it.



Mike

 

[Medusa]

Vanaf dit tijdstip, leuk dat Willem en Jeroen Sama nu ook hebben gevonden!

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1931 a dentist from Cleveland found a valley in Switzerland with 2,000 people, no doctor, no dentist, no policeman, almost no tooth decay, and a cow on every hillside.

Weston Price had spent his career looking at rotten mouths in Ohio and wanted to know what a mouth looked like before the shop arrived.

The Loetschental had no shop. One road in, closed by snow for months.

The diet was raw milk, raw butter, raw cream and raw cheese, off cows that climbed to the high pasture in June and came down in September.

Rye bread was baked once a month in the village oven and eaten with cheese cut as thick as the bread.

Meat was Sunday.

He examined thousands of teeth with no toothbrush in the valley and found decay in 3 of every 100.

The Swiss government's own records showed no death from tuberculosis in the valley at a time when it was killing the rest of the country.

The first butter after the cows reached the summer grass was deep orange, and the valley carried it to church to give thanks for it.

He went down the mountain to the towns the railway had reached, where the shop sold white flour, sugar and tinned food, and found rotten mouths and the tuberculosis ward.

Same people. Same mountains. Same cows, a train ride apart.

The entire medicine cabinet of the valley was a cow on a hill, and it ran a 97% success rate on teeth without a single qualification between them.



En weer komt Weston Price voorbij!

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Vanaf dit tijdstip, leuk dat Willem en Jeroen Sama nu ook hebben gevonden!

De desbetreffende X post:

When doctors go on strike, the death rate falls. It has been measured every time it has happened.

Israel, 1973: doctors strike for a month. Deaths in Jerusalem drop by half. The undertakers notice first.

Los Angeles, 1976: surgeons strike for 5 weeks over insurance. The county death rate falls, then climbs back to normal the week they return and the postponed operations begin.

Israel again, 1983 and 2000. Same result. Bogotá, 1976. Same. A review of every strike on record found that mortality either stayed flat or went down. Not once did it rise.

Here is why.

Medical error is the third leading cause of death in America, after heart disease and cancer, at around 250,000 a year. It does not appear on a death certificate because there is no box for it.

In Britain, 1 hospital admission in 16 is caused by a reaction to a drug the patient was correctly prescribed.

Properly prescribed medicines, taken as directed, kill about 100,000 Americans a year. That figure is 30 years old and nobody has updated it, because nobody is paid to.

The hospital is one of the most dangerous buildings a well person can enter, and the most dangerous thing in it is the pad.

So the next time your doctor is on strike, do what the data says and stay home, eat a steak and have a lie down. Statistically it is the safest appointment you will get all year.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Nobody is ever prescribed one drug. They are prescribed the first one, and the rest arrive on their own.

You are not getting a statin. You are getting a statin, an anti-inflammatory for the legs it aches, a stomach tablet for the anti-inflammatory, and metformin for the blood sugar the statin's own label has warned about since 2012.

You are not getting an antidepressant. You are getting an SSRI, a sleeping tablet for the nights it wrecks, Viagra for the bedroom it switches off, and a second antidepressant when the first one is doubled and the doubling does nothing.

You are not getting a blood pressure tablet. You are getting amlodipine, a water tablet for the ankles it swells, a potassium tablet for the potassium the water tablet drains, and allopurinol for life for the gout the water tablet brings on.

You are not getting an acid tablet. You are getting omeprazole, B12 injections for the B12 it stops you absorbing, a magnesium tablet for the magnesium it flushes, and a bone drug for the hips its own label says it thins.

You are not getting metformin. You are getting metformin, more B12 for the B12 it strips, an anti-sickness tablet for the gut it upsets, and in time a second diabetes drug, because the plate it was meant to manage has never been mentioned.

You are not getting a weight loss jab. You are getting semaglutide, an anti-nausea tablet for the mornings, a laxative for the gut it stalls, a protein shake for the muscle it eats, and a gallbladder appointment.

Six first prescriptions. Twenty-four items on the repeat slip.

Not one of the twenty-four treats a cause. Every one treats the one above it, and the first one treated a number.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Every fat has a number of doors oxygen can get in through, and the healthiest fat is the one with the fewest.

A saturated fat has no door. Oxygen bounces off it. That is why a block of lard sat on a cold shelf for a month in 1955 and nobody died.

A monounsaturated fat has one door, and it is stiff.

A polyunsaturated fat has two or more, wide open, and every one is a place the fat can be torn apart by air, light, heat or the iron in your own blood.

The share of each fat that is polyunsaturated, which is to say the share that can rot:

- Beef tallow: 4%
- Butter: 4%
- Lard: 11%
- Olive oil: 10%
- Rapeseed oil: 28%
- Corn oil: 55%
- Soybean oil: 58%
- Sunflower oil: 66%
- Grapeseed oil: 70%

The top of that list is what every kitchen on earth cooked in until 1911. The bottom of it is what you were told to switch to for your heart.

A fat with 4 doors in 100 and a fat with 66 doors in 100 are not two versions of the same thing. One is a wall. The other is a colander.

You are built out of the fat you eat, and you run at 37 degrees for 80 years. Pick the wall.



Mike

 

[Medusa]

Voor 800 jaar werden de armen van Europa periodiek vergiftigd door hun eigen brood, en de remedie, toen die kwam, was varkensvlees.

De ziekte heette het vuur van Sint-Antonius. Het begon met een branderig gevoel in handen en voeten. Daarna kwamen visioenen en stuipen. In de ergste gevallen werden vingers, tenen en hele ledematen zwart, droogden ze uit en vielen ze af zonder bloed te verliezen. Een uitbraak in Frankrijk in 944 zou volgens de overlevering tienduizenden het leven hebben gekost.

Niemand kende de oorzaak. Het was een schimmel die op rogge groeit in een natte zomer en ongezien in het brood wordt gebakken. Rogge was het brood van de armen. De rijken aten tarwe en vlees, en het vuur sloeg hen over, wat iedereen zag als een goddelijk oordeel.

Rond 1095 werd een religieuze orde opgericht om de slachtoffers te verzorgen. De broeders van Sint-Antonius runden honderden hospitalen. Hun behandeling was eenvoudig. Ze namen de lijder op, gaven hem tarwebrood en varkensvlees, en smeerden de ledematen in met reuzel. Velen genazen.

Ze genazen omdat ze waren opgehouden met het eten van rogge. De monniken wisten dat niet. Ze wisten alleen dat hun voedsel werkte.

Om de hospitalen te bevoorraden, kreeg de orde een uniek privilege. De varkens ervan mochten vrij door elke stad in Europa zwerven, met een belletje om, gevoed door wie ze ook tegenkwamen.

Stel je een middeleeuwse straat voor. Tussen de menigte dwaalt een varken met een bel om, onaantastbaar, vetgemest door het publiek om mensen te behandelen die door het graan waren verminkt.

De oorzaak werd pas in de jaren 1670 geïdentificeerd. Gedurende de hele middeleeuwen verminkte het basisvoedsel van de armen hen, en het antwoord liep gewoon over straat.

 

[Medusa]

In 2006 verbood de bevelvoerende generaal van de Amerikaanse mariniers in Irak zijn mannen het dragen van de meest populaire sportshirts in Amerika, vanwege wat de brandchirurgen aantroffen.

Het was 50 graden in de provincie Anbar. Het verstrekte katoenen T-shirt was binnen minuten doorweekt, dus mariniers hadden hun eigen exemplaren gekocht. Strakke, lichte tops van polyester die zweet afvoerden, het soort waar elke sportschool in het land vol mee hangt. Ze waren koeler en ze droogden snel. Bijna iedereen droeg ze onder de body armour.

Toen begonnen de bermbommen. Een bom onder een voertuig veroorzaakt een vuurflits die een seconde of twee duurt. Katoen verkoolt in die tijd. Polyester smelt.

De marineartsen in de veldhospitalen beschreven het resultaat. Het shirt veranderde in vloeistof en stolde weer op de borst en rug van de man. Een brandwond die had moeten overleven, werd veel erger, omdat er nu een laag plastic overheen gesmolten was die weg moest worden gesneden.

In april 2006 ging het bevel uit vanaf Camp Fallujah. Geen synthetische sportkleding buiten de basis. Het noemde de merken bij naam.

De mariniers gingen toen op zoek naar iets dat zweet afvoerde, snel droogde, na een week niet stonk en niet zou smelten. Wat ze vonden had de hele tijd in Nieuw-Zeeland staan grazen. Fijne merinowol is nu standaarduitgifte direct op de huid voor troepen die vuur verwachten.

Dat is twee keer in 25 jaar, in twee verschillende krijgsmachtonderdelen, dat plastic kleding op jonge mannen is getest door een explosie. Beide keren kwam het antwoord van een schaap.