Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

Most people who tell me carnivore didn't work for them learned it from the first wave of meatfluencers, and that first wave couldn't have told you where the fat was on a cow.

They were busy with the organs. Nose to tail or you weren't serious. Raw liver eaten to camera like a dare. Heart, kidney, spleen, a bull's testicle for the thumbnail. And at the end of every sermon, the freeze-dried organ capsules, discount code in the description. Strange how the gospel always finished at a checkout.

Fat got a line, if it got anything.

That's the diet upside down. Take away the carbohydrate and fat is the fuel, the only fuel left. Protein builds you; it was never meant to run you. The trappers of the north had a name for living on lean meat alone: rabbit starvation. Pounds of it a day, and they wasted away with full stomachs.

So the beginners did exactly as they were shown. Sirloin with the white trimmed off. Chicken breast. A palmful of capsules and a glass of water.

By week three they were exhausted, blocked up, ravenous and dreaming about toast. Back to the bread they went, telling everyone carnivore had nearly killed them.

They never tried carnivore. They tried lean protein and pills, then blamed the cow.

That's the mess I spend most of my week cleaning up.

- Buy the cut with the most white on it.
- Treat butter as a food, not a garnish.
- Pour the fat from the pan back over the meat.
- Tip what's left in the pan into a mug and drink it.

Nobody in six years has ever quit carnivore because there was too much butter on the plate. They quit because there wasn't enough.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Everything alive on this planet turns towards the sun.

Flowers swing to face it through the day.

Trees grow crooked to reach it.

Lizards lie flat on the rock to soak it in.

Cattle leave the shed to graze in it.

Dogs find the one warm patch on the carpet and sleep in it.

Babies turn their faces to the window.

Our skin makes a hormone from it that no food can fully replace.

Our blood pressure drops the moment it touches us.

Our body clock runs on it, and sleep falls apart without it.

Two million years of humans worked, hunted and rested by it.

Then one species, on the advice of a leaflet, started slathering chemicals on its skin to keep it out.

The flowers never got the memo. Neither did your bones.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1797, a British Army surgeon called John Rollo had a diabetic officer passing sugar in his urine.

He put him on meat and fat. The sugar vanished. The officer recovered. Rollo wrote it up.

For the next hundred years, low-carbohydrate eating was the standard treatment for diabetes. In the textbooks, on the wards, in what doctors actually did.

In 1915, Frederick Allen opened a diabetes clinic at the Rockefeller Institute. There was no insulin. He kept patients alive on almost no carbohydrate at all, and some lived long enough to receive the first insulin in 1922.

The diet bought them years they had no other way of getting.

Then insulin arrived, and the diet became an inconvenience.

If a needle could handle the blood sugar, nobody needed to restrict the bread. The drug had a manufacturer. The diet had nobody.

In the 1950s, Elliott Joslin, the most influential diabetes doctor in America, began quietly loosening the carbohydrate limits that had defined his own field for 150 years.

In 1977, the McGovern guidelines told the entire American public to cut fat and eat more carbohydrate. Diabetics were not excused.

By the 1980s, the American Diabetes Association was recommending that 50 to 60% of a diabetic's calories come from carbohydrate.

Half of every meal from the one thing the disease is defined by being unable to handle.

The prescriptions went up. The insulin doses went up. The amputations went up. The pharmaceutical companies posted earnings that would embarrass a small country.

In 2008, the ADA conceded that low-carbohydrate diets could be appropriate. As an option. In a footnote. After thirty years of recommending the reverse.

In 2019, a two-year trial put type 2 diabetics on a low-carbohydrate diet, and more than half came off their medication with normal blood sugar. The same result Rollo wrote up in 1797.

In 2021, Diabetes UK quietly published guidance accepting low-carbohydrate eating as a valid option.

224 years after the case report.

Remarkable pace.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

University debate: "Carnivore is just the latest fad diet."

Dietitian: "A fad has three marks. It appears from nowhere, it's sold by influencers, and it has no track record in a real population. Carnivore ticks all three. It was invented on the internet about eight years ago."

Anthropologist: "What was the year?"

Dietitian: "2018, give or take."

Anthropologist: "1928. A hospital ward in New York. An Arctic explorer and a colleague ate nothing but meat for a year under medical observation because the doctors were certain it would kill them. It didn't. They published the results and the doctors moved on to something else."

Dietitian: "Two men. That's an anecdote."

Anthropologist: "The explorer had learned it from the Inuit, who'd been doing it for a thousand years."

Dietitian: "The Inuit had no choice. You can't grow kale on ice."

Anthropologist: "The Maasai had a choice. They live in some of the best farmland in Africa, surrounded by people growing maize, and they chose milk, meat and blood for centuries and looked down on the farmers for digging."

Dietitian: "A small tribe. Genetically adapted."

Anthropologist: "The Mongols were not a small tribe. Meat and mare's milk, no bread, and they ran the largest land empire there has ever been. The people they conquered ate grain and were, on average, shorter than their horses' ears."

Dietitian: "That's warfare, not health. They died young."

Anthropologist: "Genghis went at about sixty-five, in the saddle, with his teeth. The gauchos of the pampas lived on beef and nothing else for two hundred years, and when a young English naturalist rode with them in 1833 he wrote that he'd gone weeks on meat alone and didn't dislike it at all. His name was Darwin. He turned out to know a bit about what humans are adapted to."

Dietitian: "A travel diary."

Anthropologist: "Every one of these is a travel diary to you. The Plains tribes on bison, the Sami on reindeer, the Scottish Highlander on his cow, the Irish on milk and beef before the potato was imposed on them. Each one you call an exception, and I've named six continents."

Dietitian: "They all got sick eventually."

Anthropologist: "They all got sick on the same day. The day the flour, the sugar and the seed oil arrived in the trading post. Not one of them got sick on the meat. Which brings me to your third mark. No track record in a real population."

Dietitian: "The modern version has none."

Anthropologist: "What's the track record of yours?"

Dietitian: "Mine?"

Anthropologist: "Low fat, six to eleven servings of grain, seed oil for the heart. First published 1977. No population on earth had ever eaten it before. Pushed by a committee, sold on television, and inside forty years the people who followed it were the fattest and sickest humans ever recorded."

Dietitian: "That's an oversimplification."

Anthropologist: "Appeared from nowhere, sold by the famous, no track record. Your definition, your three marks. One of us is defending the fad diet here, and hers is only forty-nine years old."

Moderator: "Closing."

Dietitian: "A diet of only meat has never been tested properly."

Anthropologist: "It was tested on every people who ever had a herd. Yours was tested on you. How's it going?"



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Most classic dishes are an animal food carrying a plant that was only there for the look of it, and the fix is to put the plant down.

Creamed spinach. Have the cream.

Cauliflower cheese. Have the cheese.

Buttered peas. Have the butter.

Steak and chips. Have the steak, and fry the fat that would have gone on the chips.

Bacon sandwich. Have the bacon, and dip it in the egg.

Cheese on toast. Have the cheese, grilled, on itself.

Beef stew with dumplings. Have the beef, and drink the gravy out of the mug.

Roast lamb with mint sauce. Have the lamb, and stop apologising for it with vinegar.

Chicken salad. Have the egg instead, and skip the chicken as well.

Full English. Have the sausage, the bacon, the eggs and the black pudding, and leave the beans in the tin where the sugar is.

Fish and chips. Have the fish, in dripping, with the skin on.

Cream tea. Have the clotted cream, and the scone can carry it to your mouth or your spoon can.

Every one of these meals was built around the animal and padded out with the cheapest thing in the kitchen, so the padding is the only part you're giving up.

Nobody has ever stared at an empty plate and missed the spinach.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Most classic dishes are an animal food carrying a plant that was only there for the look of it, and the fix is to put the plant down.

Creamed spinach. Have the cream.

Cauliflower cheese. Have the cheese.

Buttered peas. Have the butter.

Steak and chips. Have the steak, and fry the fat that would have gone on the chips.

Bacon sandwich. Have the bacon, and dip it in the egg.

Cheese on toast. Have the cheese, grilled, on itself.

Beef stew with dumplings. Have the beef, and drink the gravy out of the mug.

Roast lamb with mint sauce. Have the lamb, and stop apologising for it with vinegar.

Chicken salad. Have the egg instead, and skip the chicken as well.

Full English. Have the sausage, the bacon, the eggs and the black pudding, and leave the beans in the tin where the sugar is.

Fish and chips. Have the fish, in dripping, with the skin on.

Cream tea. Have the clotted cream, and the scone can carry it to your mouth or your spoon can.

Every one of these meals was built around the animal and padded out with the cheapest thing in the kitchen, so the padding is the only part you're giving up.

Nobody has ever stared at an empty plate and missed the spinach.



Mike

Zoals eerder gezegd, ik ga niet mee in zijn totale aversie tegen alles wat plantaardig is. Ik heb niets met groente en fruit (ook nooit gehad), maar met kruiden des te meer. Mint sauce is heeeeerlijk bij lam, verse rozemarijn ook!

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The year is 180. You are a gladiator in Ephesus, and the films will give you a body like a bronze statue. You are fed barley porridge and beans, and the crowd calls you a barley man to your face. The porridge puts a layer of fat over your muscle so the cuts bleed instead of killing, which is good for the show. The man who owns you dines on dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed. When your bones are dug up eighteen centuries later they are full of barley and almost nothing else, and a man at a university will call your diet plant-forward.

The year is 1300. You are a villein on a Hampshire manor, living, as the brochure will one day put it, in harmony with the land. The land gives you pottage: peas, beans and oats in the one pot, every day, until you die of it at forty. The hall above you smells of venison from the lord's own park, roast pork, eel, swan, butter from cows you milked before dawn. Take one deer from his wood and you lose a hand. The court that decides it sits in his hall, after dinner.

The year is 1755. You are a Highland tenant eating oatmeal three times a day, and in London Dr Johnson has just printed his dictionary. Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. The laird at the head of your glen finds this very funny over his beef. The beef was driven to market past your door.

The year is 1795. You are a Berkshire farm labourer and a clergyman is at your table with a notebook, writing down what your children eat. Bread. Tea. A little cheese. Bacon on Sunday if the pig did well. He prints it as a national disgrace. The squire you work for has a joint every day of the year and is told from the pulpit that your trouble is thrift.

The year is 1847. You are in County Clare and the potatoes have gone black in the ground for the second year running. Your family lived on them, ten pounds a day for a working man, and you are sitting in a cabin with nothing. At the harbour the ships are loading cattle, pigs, butter and bacon for England, under armed guard. The agent on the quay looks well. So does the bullock walking up the gangplank past the people who raised it.

The year is 1933. You are in a village outside Kharkiv. The grain quota has been collected, then collected again, then the brigades have come with iron rods to probe the floors for anything buried. Your children are eating boiled bark, and the dog next door has stopped barking. In the district town there is a shop for Party members with a curtain over the window. Behind the curtain there is sausage.

The year is 1997. You are in North Pyongan and the rations stopped months ago. You are stripping the inner bark from pines and boiling grass, and the famine will take hundreds of thousands before it ends. The Dear Leader's personal chef is flying to Japan for tuna, to Denmark for pork and to Iran for caviar, and will write a book about it.

The year is 2026. You are in a supermarket in England. The posters say eat less meat for the planet. The spread is plant-based, the cereal has a heart on the box, and the beef carries a warning about its footprint. You take the lentils, because you are a responsible person, and you pay more for them than the villein's pottage ever cost anyone.

The people who put the posters up flew to the climate conference, and the menu had beef on it. They eat what the lord ate, what the laird ate, what the agent on the quay ate, what the man behind the curtain ate.

Two thousand years, and the diet of grain and beans was always what the powerful handed down to the people beneath them. Everyone at both ends of the table knew what it meant.

Now it has a name, a logo and a moral, and for the first time in history the peasant is paying extra for it.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In March 1855 the most famous chef in London walked into the army hospital kitchens at Scutari and found the orderlies pouring the best part of the soldiers' dinner away.

Alexis Soyer ran the kitchens of the Reform Club, wrote bestselling cookbooks, wore his cap at a rakish angle and could never resist a newspaper. When the dispatches from the Crimea reached The Times, with sick and wounded men dying in their thousands, more of them from disease and bad food than from the Russians, he wrote to the paper offering to go out at his own expense and sort out the cooking.

The government could not believe its luck and sent him.

At Scutari, across the water from Constantinople, he found Florence Nightingale's hospital fed by orderlies with no training at all. Joints of meat tied to sticks and dropped into coppers of boiling water. A soldier's ration was a pound of meat and a pound of bread, and between the coppers and the orderlies, most of what was good in it was going missing.

When the dinners had been served he noticed a big copper still half full of rich broth, with about three inches of fat floating on top, and asked what became of it.

Throw it away, sir, they told him.

Soyer stopped them. The broth went into soup. The fat was skimmed off and used in place of butter. He rewrote the hospital diets, had the coppers retinned, trained cooks, and invented a field stove, an iron drum with the fire in the bottom, that cooked for a company on a fraction of the fuel. Nightingale, who did not hand out praise, called his death three years later a disaster for the army.

The British Army used his stove, modified over the years, for well over a century. The last big consignment went to the bottom of the South Atlantic in 1982 aboard the Atlantic Conveyor, hit by an Exocet off the Falklands.

A century after Scutari the same instruction came back as public health advice, with a chart attached, and it said exactly what the orderly said.

Throw it away, sir.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Your great-grandmother never did any of the things keeping you healthy, and she lived to see her grandchildren's children.

She never counted a calorie, because the word had not reached the kitchen.

She never drained a pan. The fat went into a bowl on the cold shelf for tomorrow's eggs.

She never bought a fat-free anything, because the shop did not stock an absence.

She never ate little and often. She ate when the work was done and until she was full, twice.

She never trimmed a joint. The crisp fat was the piece the children fought for.

She never owned a bottle of oil. She owned a tin of dripping and a dish of butter, and the butter lived on the table.

She never skimmed the milk. The cream came off the top and went on everything.

She never read a label, because there was nothing on the back of a chop.

She never once feared the sun, a sausage, an egg, a cheese or a roast, and she never once had anything to confess in January.

Everything she did is now a heresy, and everything she never did is on a government graphic.

Eat like her. She was right the first time, and the second, and the third.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Doctor: Your triglycerides are high. That's the fat in your blood. I want you on a low fat diet.

Patient: Where does the fat in my blood come from?

Doctor: Your diet.

Patient: Straight from the plate into the vein?

Doctor: Not exactly. Most of it's made in the liver.

Patient: Out of what?

Doctor: Whatever's in surplus.

Patient: Which is?

Doctor: Carbohydrate, generally. Sugar, starch, alcohol. The liver packages it as fat and sends it out.

Patient: So the fat in my blood was bread last week.

Doctor: In part.

Patient: And the plan is to take the fat off my plate and leave the bread on it.

Doctor: Low fat is the standard advice for lipids.

Patient: You've just told me the lipid's made from the carbohydrate.

Doctor: Fat is still the most energy-dense.

Patient: I'm not asking what's dense. I'm asking what my liver turns into the stuff you've measured. You said sugar and starch. Then you prescribed sugar and starch.

Doctor: Wholegrain versions.

Patient: Does my liver check the label?

Doctor: ...

Patient: What happens to triglycerides when people cut the carbohydrate instead?

Doctor: They tend to fall. Quite quickly.

Patient: How quickly?

Doctor: Weeks.

Patient: Then write that down and we'll both save a year.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The man who buried the Duke of Wellington invented the low-carb diet, and the medical press told him to mind his own business.

William Banting was the royal undertaker. He furnished the funerals of the great, and in 1852 he put on the biggest one London had ever seen, and he was by then a short man, 5ft 5, who weighed over 14 stone and could not bend to tie his shoes. He went downstairs backwards to save his knees. He wore a truss for a hernia. His hearing was going and his eyes were failing, and he was 65.

He had tried everything. Three Turkish baths a week. Rowing on the Thames every morning, which made him strong and hungry and heavier. Gallons of physic. A spa. In twenty years of doctors he had lost 6lb.

In August 1862 he went to see a surgeon about his ears. William Harvey had just come back from Paris, where he had heard a physiologist lecture on what sugar and starch did to a body, and he looked at the deaf undertaker and said the ears were not the problem. He gave him a sheet. Meat, fish, game, a glass of claret, and no bread, no sugar, no beer, no potatoes. He told him to drop butter and milk too, which was the one thing the century got wrong, and it did not matter.

By the end of the year Banting had lost 46lb and 12 inches off his waist. He could hear. He could tie his own shoes. He put on his old suit for his friends and stood inside it like a man in a tent.

Then he did the thing no gentleman was supposed to do. He wrote it all down, every stone and every meal, in a pamphlet called Letter on Corpulence, and paid for it himself, and gave the first editions away free. By the fifth edition 63,000 copies had gone, in English and then in French, German and Swedish, where his name is still the word for dieting.

The Lancet advised him not to meddle with medical literature again. The profession's view was that the literature on corpulence was tolerably complete. He had cured himself of a condition it had failed to cure for twenty years and it told him to go back to his coffins.

Everybody knows low carb began with Atkins in 1972, or with a podcast. It began with a Victorian undertaker's deafness and a surgeon who had sat in a lecture, and the pamphlet has never been out of print.

There are about 1.5 million people in Britain on a slimming injection this year. Banting's sheet cost a penny and he gave it away.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 2026 two trials took people whose minds were failing and changed what they ate, and the minds came with the food.

In schizophrenia and bipolar illness the scans have shown for decades that the brain cannot pull in its fuel. The cells struggle with glucose. The mitochondria inside them run slow.

Ketones walk into the cell without insulin. The mitochondria burn them cleaner than sugar. Epileptic children have been fed fat since 1921 because of what it does to the firing.

The first trial ran in San Francisco. 58 adults with schizophrenia or bipolar illness, randomised to a ketogenic diet or their usual food for a month.

The ketogenic group's insulin resistance fell further. The door the fuel comes through opened a little wider.

25 of them chose to carry on for four months. Their symptoms eased. Their thinking sharpened.

The paper's own title says it. The patients whose bodies improved most were the patients whose minds improved most.

The second ran in Britain. 88 adults with depression that no treatment had shifted, 7 in 10 of them women, on either a ketogenic diet or a diet heavy in fruit and vegetables, with the same dietitian for both.

At six weeks the ketogenic group's depression scores had fallen further.

Ketones tip the brain from glutamate, the accelerator, towards GABA, the brake. Calmer firing. That is the chemistry the drugs reach for with a pill.

Now the drugs. Weight goes on. Blood sugar climbs. The door closes a little more, and the second prescription arrives to treat what the first one did.

Sixty years of adjusting the chemistry inside a brain that could not get fuel.

Two trials. Two illnesses. One direction.

Somebody finally fed the organ, and the mind did what the pills had been promising all along.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1956 two doctors on a London hospital ward fed overweight patients 1,000 calories a day, changed nothing but what the calories were made of, and the patients eating mostly carbohydrate lost no weight at all.

Alan Kekwick and Gaston Pawan, the Middlesex Hospital.

Every slimming plan in the country rested on one sum. Eat less than you burn and the weight comes off, whatever the food.

So they nailed the sum to the floor. Patients kept on the ward, every meal weighed, water and salt held steady, the scales read every day.

Then they fed them the same 1,000 calories three ways.

90% fat.

90% protein.

90% carbohydrate.

1,000 calories is a starvation ration for a heavy adult. By the sum, every patient on every diet should have been losing steadily.

On the fat, the weight fell fastest. Some of them dropped more than a pound a day.

On the protein, the weight fell.

On the carbohydrate, the same 1,000 calories, the weight sat where it was.

On the fat ration the patients' urine carried a substance that pulled fat out of storage, and their blood filled with ketones, the fuel a body makes from its own fat. On the carbohydrate ration, neither appeared.

Carbohydrate raises insulin, and insulin is the hormone that keeps fat locked in storage. The calories were identical. The lock was not.

Seventy years on, the advice at the surgery is still the sum. Eat less, move more, and choose the low-fat option to make the calories go further.

The low-fat option is the one that stood still on a London hospital ward in 1956.

1,000 calories of carbohydrate kept a heavy patient heavy, and the woman on her fourth slimming club is still being told the problem is her willpower.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Twenty-two men lived for four and a half months under two upturned rowing boats on a rock off Antarctica, eating nothing but penguin and seal, and all twenty-two came home.

Shackleton's Endurance had gone down in the ice in November 1915 and the crew had drifted on floes and rowed through the Southern Ocean until, on 15 April 1916, they stood on Elephant Island, the first land under their feet in 497 days. It was a spit of guano-covered rock with a penguin colony on it and a wind that took tents apart. Nine days later Shackleton and five men left in the one seaworthy boat for South Georgia, 800 miles away, and the other twenty-two were told to wait.

They turned the two remaining boats over on a wall of stones, roofed them with canvas, and called the result the Snuggery. Frank Wild ran it like a ship. Every morning the same words: lash up and stow, the Boss might come today. They burned seal blubber for heat and made lamps from sardine tins with bandage for wicks. Breakfast was seal steak. Lunch was hoosh, which was seal. Dinner was penguin. Nobody saw a vegetable, a biscuit or a grain of flour for the duration, and the diaries record men trading half a penguin steak a day against a future that might never arrive.

The stowaway, Perce Blackborow, nineteen, had frozen his feet in the boats. On 15 June the two surgeons took every toe off his left foot in the hut, with chloroform, by the light of the blubber stove, in 55 minutes. He lived. They all lived.

On 30 August a Chilean tug came round the point and Shackleton stood in the bow and shouted to know if they were all well. Wild shouted back that they were, all safe, all well, and an hour later the island was empty.

Twenty-two Edwardian men, five years before the first vitamin was isolated, kept alive and sane for 137 days by the two fattest animals on the continent. The science that would have told them this was impossible had not been written yet, which may be why it worked.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

A lamb is a baby, and the lorry comes for it before it has seen a winter.

Born in March on a hillside, into weather. Six weeks on nothing but its mother's milk, the fattest thing it will ever drink.

Six weeks, and it is on the grass. The rumen switches on, four stomachs start turning hill pasture into red muscle, and the iron begins to build.

Three months, and the fat is laying down under the skin, the muscle is darkening, and the creatine and carnosine climb with every week it works the slope.

Four or five months, and the lorry comes. Some get to autumn. None get to a birthday. That is the cut-off, because the carcass has reached the weight the chiller pays for and the ground is wanted for the next one. Everything the animal was about to become is sold the week before it becomes it.

So here is what it would have become, because the ewe beside it was allowed to find out.

One year, and the flavour has arrived, the first thing the lamb never lived long enough to grow.

Two years, and she has reared a lamb of her own, and the iron in her muscle is already past anything the five-month-old carried.

Three years, and the fat is deeper and firmer, built over summers of grass and hydrogenated in the rumen before any of it reached her, with more of the long-chain omega-3 than any lamb, beef or veal on the counter.

Four years, and the carnitine, the taurine and the creatine have been accumulating in that red muscle every month she climbed the hill, and the meat is now darker than beef.

Five years, and she has raised a lamb every spring, grown a fleece every year, and spent every one of those summers loose on ground that will grow nothing but grass and sheep.

And the hill she walked is better for her having walked it. Her teeth kept the bracken off and the turf open. Her dung fed the soil. The curlew and the skylark nest in short grass that only exists because something was grazing it. Take her off that slope and it goes under bracken inside a decade, with nothing on it worth crossing a road to see, and the family that kept it goes with her.

Then she comes down off the hill, and she is mutton. More iron, more fat, more flavour, more of every nutrient that only builds with age, off an animal that had a life and gave the hill a reason to stay a hill. Britain fed itself on her for seven hundred years, and most people under sixty have never tasted her once.

The lamb is a promise sold at five months. The mutton is the promise kept.

Buy the shoulder. The hill, the shepherd and the country she kept open all come with it.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

I sat down the other night and tried to add up how many hours of my twenties went on food before I stopped letting it, and I gave up at the point where the number could have paid for a cathedral.

Not the eating. The eating was the short bit. It was everything stood around the eating like relatives at a wedding.

Standing in a kitchen at half six wondering what to have. Opening the fridge for the fourth time in case something had arrived. The shop, the queue, the carrier bag that cut the hand. The chopping board. The rice, which has to be watched, because rice is the only food that punishes you for leaving the room. Six tubs on a Sunday night, lids on, dated, stacked in the fridge like a filing cabinet for a man who had forgotten how to be hungry. Two pans, one sink, and me in it.

Then the meal itself, eaten by the clock, and then the part nobody counts: the hour afterwards on the sofa, heavy as a wet dog, waiting for a sandwich to finish happening to me.

Then three o'clock, and the hunger back like a man who has not been paid.

Now the day is a litre of raw goat milk, usually drunk standing up, done. One meal, two if the mood takes me, out of one pan: mutton mince frying in its own fat, four eggs cracked into it, a slab of cheese, butter on the lot. Ten minutes to cook. Ten to eat. Nothing afterwards, because a plate of fat does not knock you over, it just switches the hunger off and lets you go. Lunch ends and food leaves my head until tomorrow, like a guest who knows when to leave.

Call it two hours a day I used to give the question of what to put in my mouth. Fourteen hours a week. A full working day, every week, for ten years, handed to a problem a cow had already solved.

With that back I'd have Welsh by now. Proper Welsh, chapel Welsh. The cello. A dry stone wall from my house to the coast, built by hand, admired by sheep. I'd have read the Russians, all of them, including the ones who are mainly weather. I'd have a second trade, a boat, and a dog that could park.

Instead I had chicken and rice and a lie-down.

The diet everyone calls restrictive is the only one that ever gave me a day a week back, and the balanced one took it, three meals at a time, without once saying thank you.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 2007 a vegetarian professor at Stanford put 311 overweight women on four famous diets for a year, fully expecting the Atkins diet to come last, and it beat the other three on everything he measured.

Christopher Gardner, by his own account a vegetarian for decades, ran the trial because he wanted the question settled.

Four groups. Atkins, the low-carb diet the medical profession had spent 30 years calling dangerous. Ornish, the near-vegan low-fat diet the profession adored. The Zone. And LEARN, the official calorie-counting guidance.

Premenopausal women, overweight or obese, a year each, measured at the end.

Weight lost. Atkins 4.7 kilos. The official guidance 2.6. The near-vegan diet 2.2. The Zone 1.6.

Blood pressure. Atkins came down furthest.

Triglycerides. Atkins lowest.

HDL, the number cardiologists call good. Atkins highest.

LDL, the number the whole fear was built on. No worse on Atkins than on the others.

The women eating the most fat and the least bread lost the most weight and finished with the best blood, and the diet built on beans and grain finished near the bottom of a table its own authors had designed.

Gardner published it in the journal of the American Medical Association and said in public that he had been surprised.

The diet sheet in the clinic the women were recruited from was still the low-fat one.

The vegetarian ran the fairest test anybody had ever run on the butter. The butter won. He went back to his beans, and so did the sheet.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Cannibalism made the Donner Party famous. Fat decided who survived it, and the women came out alive at a far higher rate than the men.

In the spring of 1846 a wagon train left Springfield, Illinois, for California. After a disastrous shortcut, its families were trapped below a pass in the Sierra Nevada by snow that would bury their cabins to the roof. Of the 87 people in the party, 48 survived.

They ate the oxen first. Then the dogs. Then they boiled the ox hides into a grey glue and ate that. Then, as everyone knows, they ate the dead.

The figure that nobody puts on the poster came 144 years later, when an archaeologist at the University of Washington, Donald Grayson, sat down with the roster and asked a plain question: who died first?

The men. More than half the males died. Fewer than a third of the females did. In Grayson's words, the men "just went like flies".

The sharpest test came on 16 December 1846, when fifteen of the strongest set out across the pass on homemade snowshoes to fetch help: ten men and five women. They expected the walk to take a week. It took 33 days, with almost nothing to eat, through blizzards and the kind of cold that kills by burning through the body's fuel. Seven reached a ranch on the far side. Two of them were men.

All five women made it.

Two of them were sisters. Mary Ann Graves was 19. On Christmas Day their father, dying at the place the survivors named the Camp of Death, told his daughters to use his body to stay alive. Her sister Sarah sat up through a January night in the snow beside her husband, Jay Fosdick, until he died, then lay down next to him and waited to freeze. In the morning she got up and walked on.

Grayson's explanation was physiology. Women carry more of their weight as fat, roughly 27% against about 15% in men, and more of it sits under the skin, where it insulates as well as feeds. Women also burn energy more slowly, an adaptation for carrying children through lean seasons. The men, meanwhile, had done the heavy work of hacking a road through the mountains for the wagons, and had burned through their reserves before the snow came.

In a famine the body runs on what it has stored. It holds enough carbohydrate in the liver for about a day. A woman of average build carries enough fat for weeks. On that pass, the fat was the difference between the five who walked into the ranch and the eight left on the trail.

The female body treats that reserve as non-negotiable. In 1974 a Harvard researcher showed that a girl's periods begin only once she carries enough fat, and stop when it falls too low. The body keeps a famine store before it will risk a pregnancy, because for most of human history the famine was coming.

The women of 2026 are told something very different about the same tissue. It is the enemy of every magazine cover, a number to be driven down, the target of a diet industry built on making women hungry and an injection prescribed to make them less so. They are taught to see their own reserve as a defect, by an industry that would have weighed the Forlorn Hope at the starting line and congratulated the men.

The Sierra Nevada ran the only weight-loss trial in history with an honest endpoint. The women won it with the tissue they are now told to be ashamed of.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Eat a mouthful of grass and you get nothing. It goes in green and comes out green, with a slightly sore jaw for your trouble.

Eat straw and you get nothing. Your gut cannot touch cellulose, and it will tell you so for two days.

Eat acorns and you get tannins, a bitter mouth and a very long afternoon.

Eat bracken and you get a carcinogen with a view.

Eat nettles, thistles, gorse, rushes and heather and you get a mouth full of blood and not one calorie.

Eat the beet pulp, the oat husks and the spent brewer's grain and you get the sweepings the factory could not sell to a human at any price.

Now put the whole hillside in front of a cow.

She turns every one of them into steak, butter, cream, milk and a leather coat, on ground that will never grow a lettuce, using four stomachs and a fermentation vat you were not issued.

The grass she eats grew on rain and sunlight, for free, on a slope nobody can plough, and she walks up it herself.

She is the only creature on earth that can take a field of inedible fibre and hand you back the most nutrient-dense food there is, and she does it while being told she is the problem.

She is eating the 90% of the planet's plants that you cannot. Nobody at the table was going to touch them.

Best plant-based diet ever invented. It just has a cow in the middle doing the chewing.



Mike