Sama Hoole X-berichten

[Medusa]

Het jaar is 1956. Je moeder verwacht jou, en haar dokter rookt tijdens de afspraak. Meer dokters roken Camels dan welk ander merk ook, zeggen de advertenties, en hij vertelt haar dat een paar per dag haar zenuwen kalmeert en de baby klein houdt voor een makkelijke bevalling.

Het jaar is 1960. Je eerste echte schoenen komen uit een winkel met een röntgenapparaat in de hoek. Je schuift je voeten in de sleuf en ziet je eigen tenenbotjes kronkelen, groen en gloeiend, terwijl de assistent de pasvorm controleert. Je gaat terug elke keer dat je voeten groeien.

Het jaar is 1961. Je moeder verwacht je zusje en de misselijkheid is erg. De apotheker heeft een nieuwe tablet, geadverteerd als volkomen veilig tijdens de zwangerschap. Je zusje arriveert het volgende jaar samen met 10.000 andere baby's wier moeders het namen, en sommigen van hen arriveren zonder armen.

Het jaar is 1964. Drie keelontstekingen, dus de amandelen gaan eruit, net als bij meer dan een miljoen kinderen per jaar aan beide kanten van de Atlantische Oceaan. Twintig bedden, en de belofte van ijs. Niemand vraagt waarvoor de amandelen dienden. Ze waren het immuunsysteem, en de operatie deed nooit veel voor de keel.

Het jaar is 1972. Je bent zestien en elke auto ter wereld rijdt op loodhoudende benzine. Het lood komt uit de uitlaat en nestelt zich op het schoolplein, de moestuin en het bloed van elk kind dat naar school loopt. De mannen die het in de benzine stopten, wisten al in de jaren 1920 wat het met een brein deed. Het verbod komt pas als je in de veertig bent.

Het jaar is 1981. De handen van je moeder zijn stijf geworden. De dokter heeft een nieuwe tablet tegen artritis met de grootste lancering die de farmaceutische industrie ooit heeft opgezet. Twee jaar later wordt het teruggetrokken aan beide kanten van de Atlantische Oceaan, met tientallen gepensioneerden dood wier nieren het niet konden afvoeren. Zij komt er genadig vanaf: de zon verbrandt haar erop, en ze brengt een zomer door achter de gordijnen.

Het jaar is 1991. Je vader is diabeet, en de diëtist geeft hem een vel papier. Meer dan de helft van zijn calorieën moet uit koolhydraten komen: brood, aardappelen, pasta, granen. Zijn suiker stijgt erop, dus zijn insuline stijgt mee, en zijn middel volgt. Hij doet twintig jaar lang wat hem wordt opgedragen.

Het jaar is 1998. Je rug is naar de knoppen. De dokter heeft een nieuwe opioïde, en de vertegenwoordiger draagt een brief van een medisch tijdschrift waarin staat dat verslaving eraan minder dan 1% is. De brief is vijf zinnen lang. Het bedrijf pleit twee keer schuldig, en tegen de tweede keer zijn meer dan een half miljoen Amerikanen dood.

Het jaar is 2002. Je knieën doen pijn, en de dokter heeft een nieuwe pil die milder is voor de maag. Je neemt het twee jaar, dezelfde twee jaar dat de fabrikant zit op zijn eigen hartgegevens. Het wordt teruggetrokken met zoveel als 140.000 hartaanvallen aan zijn deur toegeschreven. Jouw hart was prima. Dat van de man naast de deur niet.

Het jaar is 2008. Je vrouw heeft een prolaps na drie kinderen, en de chirurg plaatst een strook plastic gaas. Zodra het weefsel erdoorheen groeit, kan het er niet meer uit. Australië biedt in 2018 excuses aan aan zijn vrouwen, Amerika verbiedt het in 2019, Groot-Brittannië biedt excuses aan in 2020. Je vrouw krijgt het hare per persbericht.

Het jaar is 2026. Je bent zeventig, en de nieuwe dokter heeft een scherm en een getal voor alles. Het vlees op je bord is een gevaar. De olie in de fles is goed voor je hart. De injectie is voor het leven. Hij is even oud als de eerste dokter was toen hij een Camel opstak voor je moeder, en even zeker van zijn zaak.

Geen van hen was een uitschieter. Elk was de standaard van zorg, onderwezen aan de volgende dokter, gedrukt op het bijsluiter, en overhandigd aan een familie zonder manier om het te controleren.

Je hebt zeventig jaar doorgebracht als het experiment. De resultaten komen naar buiten nadat je weg bent, onder iemands anders naam, en de stoel waarin je zit is waar ze werven voor de volgende.

 

[fatsnotbad]

How butter is made.

Take cream from a cow.

Shake it.

Pour off the buttermilk.

Salt it.

Three steps, and a child can do all of them.

How seed oil is made.

Take seeds. Cook them at 88°C to split the cell walls and kill the proteins.

Crush them under tonnes of pressure.

Soak the paste in hexane, a petroleum solvent used to strip grease off engine parts.

Boil most of the hexane back off. Some stays in. The regulators have had a think and decided they are relaxed about it.

Wash the brown, stinking sludge in caustic soda, because the oil has gone rancid before it has left the factory.

Bleach it through clay, so you never find out what colour it really is.

Steam it at 240°C under vacuum for an hour to take the smell off, because without this step no human being would let it near a frying pan.

Pour the clear, odourless, flavourless result into a plastic bottle and put a heart on the label.

Nine steps, a chemical plant and a fire certificate.

But yes. Healthier than the one the child made.



Ik was even vergeten dat men in Engeland standaard gezouten boter eet. Hier in NL is het precies omgekeerd. Als Sama Hoole dus standaard vrachten boter overal bij gebruikt krijgt hij ook vrachten zout binnen. Hetzelfde geldt ook voor zijn bacon, deze is gepekeld. Hij mag dan geen kruiden gebruiken van plantaardige bronnen, maar je kan niet zeggen dat zijn eten niet gekruid is.

Het verklaart ook waarom hij in de problemen kwam toen hij extra zout toevoegde aan zijn maaltijden. Daarnaast eet hij niet alternatief/biologisch en is volgens mij niet op de hoogte van Keltisch zeezout. Als je dus veel te veel geraffineerd keukenzout consumeert ga je daar last van krijgen, dat lijkt me logisch.

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Rep: "I'd like to present a new intervention for type 2 diabetes."

Panel: "Mechanism?"

Rep: "Removes the substrate. Blood glucose falls because nothing's arriving."

Panel: "Efficacy?"

Rep: "In a 2-year trial, just over half the patients had no diabetes at the end of it. Two thirds of the ones on insulin came off it entirely."

Panel: "Adverse events?"

Rep: "A headache in week one. Some constipation, resolved by increasing the dose of the fatty component."

Panel: "Cost per patient?"

Rep: "Negative. One Southport practice that ran it spent £68,000 a year less on diabetes drugs than its neighbours."

Panel: "Patent?"

Rep: "None. Expired about 2 million years ago."

Panel: "Manufacturer?"

Rep: "Any cow."

[The panel confers.]

Panel: "I'm sorry?"

Rep: "Steak, eggs, butter, and no bread. That's the compound."

Panel: "We can't appraise a diet."

Rep: "You appraise a pill that lowers a number. This lowers the number, the dose, the bill and the waiting list."

Panel: "There's no sponsor."

Rep: "There's a butcher. He's outside with the samples."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Roman slaves ate bread, olives and porridge, washed down with vinegar.
Roman senators ate boar, dormice and peacock.

Egyptian labourers raised the pyramids on bread, onions and beer.
The pharaoh ate beef.

Spartan helots ate barley and figs.
The Spartans who owned them ate a black broth of pork and blood.

Chinese peasants ate millet and rice.
Genghis Khan's horsemen rode over them on mutton and mare's milk.

Indian lower castes ate rice, lentils and flatbread.
The Mughal emperors ate lamb off gold plates.

Japanese peasants ate rice and pickles.
The samurai ate fish and game.

Medieval serfs ate pottage and black bread.
The lord ate venison, and blinded a serf for touching a deer.

Tudor commoners ate bread cut with chalk.
Henry VIII's court went through thousands of cattle a year.

Irish cottiers ate potatoes, and in 1847 they ate grass.
Their landlords ate beef, and shipped the rest to England past the dying.

Plantation slaves ate cornmeal and a weekly scrap of fatback.
The planter ate ham, oysters and cream.

Victorian mill hands ate bread, tea and jam.
The Victorian aristocracy ate beef, game and butter.

Soviet collective farmers ate black bread and cabbage soup.
Stalin served his inner circle roast meat and caviar until four in the morning.

Every civilisation. Every century. Every continent.

The poor got the plants.
The powerful took the animals.

Nobody in five thousand years ran a trial on it. They watched which men grew tall and which men obeyed, and kept the meat for themselves.

Then in 1977 a wheat-state senator, a Harvard professor on sugar money and a reporter with no training told the world the slave's plate had been the healthy one all along.

No pharaoh ever fed the pottage to his own son.

They fed it to yours.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Soy is sold to women in the menopause as nature's HRT, and the two-year trial of it gave them more hot flushes.

What the soy aisle says:
- Plant oestrogen, the natural way
- Cools the flushes
- Protects the bones
- The reason Japanese women sail through it

What 200mg of soy isoflavones a day did to 248 women aged 45 to 60, over two years:
- No protection for bone at the hip or spine
- Hot flushes in 48% of the soy group
- Hot flushes in 32% of the placebo group
- The only symptom that differed, and soy made it worse

That dose is several times what anyone in Japan eats in a typical day, so nobody can say she wasn't given enough.

Women were told to cool down with tofu, and the trial promptly turned the heating up.

The usual advice came with it: swap the dairy for soy, at the exact age the bones start thinning.

Black cohosh, sold off the same shelf for the same flushes, was put through a year-long trial in 2006 and did no better than a dummy pill, which at least put it ahead of the soy.

In 1999 the American FDA let soy carry a heart-health claim on the packet. In 2017 it moved to take the claim back, the first time it had ever tried to withdraw one.

The flushes went up by half, and the packet still says natural.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

A man and a woman walk into the same surgery with the same problem, and she walks out with worse advice, every time, by design.

He is told to eat more protein. She is told to eat less, and has been told it since she was fourteen.

He is told to lift something heavy. She is told to walk it off, keep it light, and mind she does not get bulky, as if muscle were a thing that happened to women by accident.

He is told a steak is a good dinner. She is told a steak is a treat, to have the salad, and to be good.

He is given 2,500 calories to live on. She is given 1,200, which is the ration of a besieged city, and told that the hunger is proof it is working. She has been hungry for thirty years and has never once been told that was the problem.

He gets the full-fat version. She gets the one with a woman in a white vest on the lid, the fat taken out and the sugar put back in to hide the theft.

He is told to eat red meat for his iron. She is told to eat spinach for hers, and loses blood every month for forty years on the advice of a leaf.

He is told his tiredness is worth a test. She is told hers is her age, her hormones, her stress or the children, in that order, for a decade, and the test she finally gets comes back within range, which is the end of the conversation.

He is told to cut the carbs at fifty. She is told wholegrains will see her through the menopause, at the one moment in her life her body can no longer handle them, and when the weight arrives anyway she is told that is just what happens now.

He is told his belly is a risk. She is told to lose a stone before anyone will look at anything else, on the diet that put the stone there.

He gets a plan. She gets a club, a weigh-in, a sticker, and the quiet understanding that if it fails the fault is hers.

Forty years of being told she is the difficult patient, and the one diet that hands her the plate he was always given is the one they call extreme.

Beef, eggs, butter, until full. No ration, no small plate, no club, no being good.

It works harder on her than it ever does on him, because she has further to come back from. The weight, the sleep, the fog, the joints, the thyroid nobody looked at, the hunger she thought was her personality, all of it going, for the price of being fed like a human being instead of a customer.

She was never failing the advice. The advice was built to keep her small, and she did it perfectly.

The dinner he was having all along was the fix.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Mary Shelley made Frankenstein's monster a vegetarian, in a household whose leading theory was that meat made men violent.

It's there in his own words, when he corners Victor Frankenstein on the glacier and demands a mate. He promises the pair of them will live peacefully in the wilds of South America, and that he doesn't eat what men eat: "I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite." Acorns and berries will do.

The line had a source. Mary's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, had published a pamphlet in 1813 called A Vindication of Natural Diet. It argued that the myth of Prometheus stealing fire was really the story of mankind learning to cook flesh, and that disease, tyranny and the violent passions followed from the meat. A diet of vegetables and pure water, Percy reckoned, would gentle the human race.

He lived it, on and off. A friend from his Oxford days remembered him walking about with bread in his pockets, eating as he went.

Then Mary sat down at the Villa Diodati in the wet summer of 1816 and gave the vegetarian diet to her most famous creation.

He is eight feet tall on nuts and berries, which is the first problem with the theory. He reads Paradise Lost and Plutarch and speaks better than anyone else in the book, which is the part Percy would have liked. And over the course of the novel he strangles a small boy, frames a servant girl who hangs for it, strangles Victor's closest friend, and strangles Victor's bride on her wedding night.

Gentle on acorns. Lethal on acorns.

None of this dented the idea. The belief that meat makes people aggressive and plants make them peaceful went from Percy's pamphlet into the Victorian vegetarian societies, and it still turns up on placards and in documentaries, usually alongside the promise that a plant-based world will be a kinder one.

Percy's proof was anatomy. Man, he wrote, "has neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre." The same argument still does the rounds as a meme, usually beside a photograph of a lion, and usually posted by a member of the only species that invented the knife.

Halloween has just been and gone, and the monster was on every second costume rail. He makes a decent mascot for the idea: stitched together from borrowed parts, and responsible for four graves by the last chapter.

Mary Shelley handed literature's gentlest diet to its most famous strangler, and her husband, who wrote the theory, never seemed to notice the joke.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Customer: "A turkey for Christmas. Seven kilos."

Butcher: "Have you thought about a goose?"

Customer: "Too fatty."

Butcher: "That's the review."

Customer: "Mum always said it was greasy."

Butcher: "Your mum's mum roasted the potatoes in it till Easter. A goose gives you a pint of fat in the tray. A turkey gives you a dry bird and a tub of something from the supermarket to pour over it."

Customer: "It's a lot of money for not much meat."

Butcher: "It's the same money for twice the dinner. The meat's dark, the fat's in it, and the carcass makes a stock you could stand a spoon in. A turkey's a chicken that's been to the gym."

Second customer: "We had goose last year. The dog's still talking about it."

Customer: "What did people eat before turkey?"

Butcher: "Goose. For about a thousand years. The turkey walked in from Mexico in the 1500s and got the job on size. Nobody checked whether it could cook."

Customer: "Isn't it harder to do?"

Butcher: "It's harder to ruin. The fat looks after it. The turkey's the one with a hotline."

Customer: "Go on. A goose. And the fat."

Butcher: "The fat comes with it. You just have to take the bird away first. That's the bit they stopped teaching."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The ruminant family, and the one job each of them does that nothing else on earth can.

The cow turns a wet hillside into beef and milk, and leaves the soil better than she found it.

The sheep grows a fireproof, waterproof, compostable coat every year, out of grass and rain, and then gives it away for the price of a haircut.

The goat eats the bramble, the scrub and the invasive weed that strangles everything else, and asks only for a weak point in the fence.

The water buffalo makes the milk that becomes real mozzarella, standing in marsh a cow would sink in.

The yak gives milk at an altitude that would kill a lowland animal in a week, and carries your bags up there as well.

The reindeer feeds and clothes entire peoples above the Arctic Circle, on lichen and moss, in the dark, for months.

The bison built the deepest soil on the planet by walking across it and eating.

Seven animals, one gift each, and not one of them can be replaced by a crop, a machine or a sachet.

Every one of them is classed, this decade, as a liability on a spreadsheet by somebody who has never been cold.



Mike

 

[Medusa]

The ruminant family, and the one job each of them does that nothing else on earth can.

The cow turns a wet hillside into beef and milk, and leaves the soil better than she found it.

The sheep grows a fireproof, waterproof, compostable coat every year, out of grass and rain, and then gives it away for the price of a haircut.

The goat eats the bramble, the scrub and the invasive weed that strangles everything else, and asks only for a weak point in the fence.

The water buffalo makes the milk that becomes real mozzarella, standing in marsh a cow would sink in.

The yak gives milk at an altitude that would kill a lowland animal in a week, and carries your bags up there as well.

The reindeer feeds and clothes entire peoples above the Arctic Circle, on lichen and moss, in the dark, for months.

The bison built the deepest soil on the planet by walking across it and eating.

Seven animals, one gift each, and not one of them can be replaced by a crop, a machine or a sachet.

Every one of them is classed, this decade, as a liability on a spreadsheet by somebody who has never been cold.



Mike

@fatsnotbad weet je wat zo gek is? Ik kom deze post tegen op mijn tijdlijn op X maar als ik dan naar jouw persoonlijke X-pagina ga dan zie ik hem niet.....RAAR!