Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

In December 1960 the most famous writer in the world was checked into the Mayo Clinic under his own doctor's name, officially for his blood pressure, and given up to fifteen rounds of electric shock to the brain, and when he came out he could no longer write a sentence, and six months later he was dead.

Ernest Hemingway was 61. He had the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, the houses in Cuba and Idaho, and a head that had been battered more times than anyone could count. He had been blown up by a mortar in Italy in 1918, split his skull open in a London car crash in 1944, been thrown from a motorcycle by a shell in France the same year, and walked away from two plane crashes in Africa on consecutive days in 1954, the second leaving fluid leaking from his skull. He drank enormously. By 1960 he was paranoid, convinced the FBI was following him, unable to finish the Paris memoir he had nearly completed.

The Mayo psychiatrist, Howard Rome, treated it as depression and gave him the treatment of the day. Electroconvulsive therapy was the modern answer in 1960, quicker than analysis and tidier than the lobotomy it had replaced. Hemingway went home to Ketchum in January.

He was worse. Asked to write a single line for a presentation volume for the new President Kennedy, he sat at his desk for a week, could not do it, and wept that it just won't come anymore. In April his wife Mary found him in a state that terrified her, and he was flown back to Rochester for another course of shocks.

At the Mayo he told his friend A.E. Hotchner what the treatment had done. His memory was his capital, he said, the thing his whole trade was built on, and they had wiped it and put him out of business. "It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient."

The clinic discharged him at the end of June as improved. On the morning of 2 July 1961, at home in Ketchum, he took his own life.

The psychiatrist who has studied his head injuries most closely, Andrew Farah, argues that the man in Rome's office was not simply depressed but living in a brain wrecked by a lifetime of concussions and drink, and that electricity was the last thing it needed. The FBI files released in the 1980s showed he really had been watched for years, which is a hard way to learn that a patient's paranoia was partly a report.

None of that got a hearing in 1960. The diagnosis was in the textbook, the treatment was in the textbook, and the patient's complaint that it was taking his mind was in the textbook too, listed as a side effect, expected and temporary.

They treated the most observant man in American letters for being wrong about what he was seeing, and the last thing he saw clearly was what they had done to him.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The heaviest president in American history was put on a low-carb diet by a London doctor in 1905, by post, and lost 59 pounds in four months.

William Howard Taft was then Secretary of War, five foot eleven and 314 pounds, sleeping badly and plagued by indigestion. On a family recommendation he wrote to Nathaniel Yorke-Davies, a London physician who had written a book called Foods for the Fat.

The reply came with a timetable. At eight, a tumbler of hot water with lemon, sipped slowly. At nine, tea or coffee with no sugar, two or three gluten biscuits, and six ounces of lean grilled meat. Lunch was four ounces of lean meat, cooked greens and a little stewed fruit with no sugar, and dinner much the same. No sugar, no sweets, almost no bread or potatoes. Taft was to weigh himself every morning and send the figures to London every week.

He did. His secretary posted the records across the Atlantic. Yorke-Davies wrote to Taft's family to ask how he was looking. When a month's loss came in at nine pounds instead of fourteen, the doctor wrote back that he had heard Taft was stouter than he had been.

By April 1906 Taft was down from 314 pounds to 255. The heartburn had eased, and he asked for a diet to hold him there.

Then came the presidency, the state dinners and a job he had never really wanted. By his inauguration in 1909 he was 354 pounds. Only after he left the White House did he get the weight off and keep it off.

None of it was considered a fad. In 1905, a doctor who wanted a fat man thinner took away the sugar and the starch and gave him meat, and the future president of the United States signed up without anyone thinking it worth remarking on. It was simply medicine.

It took the rest of the century for that to become controversial.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

A fatty liver is very often a liver that cannot get its fat back out, and the part it needs to do the shipping is in the egg yolk you were told to throw away.

Your liver is not meant to store fat. It packages it into particles called VLDL and sends them out into the blood to be used.

Every one of those particles needs a coat, and the coat is made of phosphatidylcholine. No choline, no coat. No coat, no shipping. The fat stays where it is.

This is not a theory. It is how researchers give a laboratory animal a fatty liver on purpose: they take the choline out of its feed.

In 2007 a team at the University of North Carolina did it to people, under supervision. Fifty-seven healthy adults, ten days on a normal choline intake, then up to six weeks on almost none.

77% of the men developed fatty liver or muscle damage. So did 80% of the postmenopausal women. Among women who had not yet reached the menopause, it was 44%.

The difference is oestrogen. It switches on a gene called PEMT that lets the liver make some of its own choline. The menopause switches it off, and from then on a woman needs it from her food, exactly as a man does.

When the choline went back in, the livers recovered.

The richest everyday source is egg yolk, about 147mg each, with liver and beef behind it. Plants carry a fraction of that.

Around 9 in 10 Americans eat less than the adequate intake.

For thirty years the advice was two or three eggs a week, and the whites rather than the yolks, and the people who took it most seriously were the middle-aged worried about their cholesterol. A great many of them were women past the menopause.

Fatty liver disease now runs at around a quarter of adults worldwide, and in women it climbs after the menopause.

The advice took the yolk off the plate of the one group whose own supply had just been switched off.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

It takes a thousand years to build 3 centimetres of topsoil, and the world loses a football pitch of it every 5 seconds.

A third of the planet's farmable soil is already degraded. The UN's own warning was 60 harvests left.

Iowa, the richest ground in America, has lost close to half its topsoil since 1850, ploughed loose and sent down the Mississippi.

Warming gets the summits and the placards. The soil that grows 95% of your food is washing away right now, and that is the one that starves you.

The deepest, blackest, most fertile ground on earth, the American prairie, the Russian steppe, the Ukrainian black earth that feeds the world, was built by one thing.

Herds. Tens of millions of bison, trampling, dunging and moving on, over roots 15 feet deep, packing carbon into the ground for 10,000 years.

The plough switched that off. The cow, moved like the wild herd, switches it back on. Graze it right and the carbon sinks, the soil thickens, and the rain soaks in instead of tearing the field down the river.

A tractor cannot build soil. A fertiliser bag cannot build soil. Only the herd ever has.

So saving the world's dirt means more cattle on grass, not fewer, and the best machine ever built for the job is the animal they want off your plate.

You will hear about the cow's burp right up until the last of the topsoil reaches the sea.



Mike

 

[Medusa]

1898: Bayer registreert een handelsmerk voor een nieuw hoestmiddel voor kinderen. Ze noemen het Heroïne.

1899: Ze registreren ook aspirine als handelsmerk. Geniet ervan. Het is het laatste onmiskenbaar goede ding op deze lijst.

1900: Heroïne is Bayers bestverkochte product, dat aan moeders wordt verkocht als niet-verslavend.

1915: Bayers chemici helpen met het inzetten van gifgas in de loopgraven, en de voorzitter van het bedrijf pleit ervoor in Berlijn.

1925: Bayer fuseert tot een chemisch reus genaamd IG Farben.

Jaren 1940: IG Farben bouwt een fabriek met dwangarbeid in Auschwitz en is mede-eigenaar van het bedrijf dat Zyklon B produceert.

1956: Een directeur die in Neurenberg is veroordeeld voor slavernij en plundering, wordt stilletjes voorzitter van de raad van bestuur van Bayer.

Jaren 1980: Bayer ontdekt dat zijn bloedproduct voor hemofiliepatiënten vol zit met hiv. In plaats van de voorraad te vernietigen, blijft het onbehandelde batches verkopen aan Azië en Latijns-Amerika om het geld terug te verdienen. Duizenden hemofiliepatiënten raken besmet. Velen sterven.

2003: The New York Times publiceert de documenten. Bayer helpt bij een schikking van ongeveer 600 miljoen dollar en geeft niets toe.

2018: Bayer koopt Monsanto, en neemt in één middag Roundup, Agent Orange en PCB's over.

2026: Het Hooggerechtshof van de VS verwerpt de kankeraanspraken tegen Roundup. Bayer wint.

Heroïne, gifgas, Auschwitz, besmet bloed en een onkruidverdelger voor de rechtbank, allemaal van één bedrijf.

Elk ervan was legaal, verkocht met totale zelfverzekerdheid en gezegend door de experts van die tijd, en het bedrijf is nu groter dan het ooit is geweest.

De heroïne werd teruggeroepen. Het bedrijf nooit.

 

[Medusa]

Een vitamine D-capsule geeft je vitamine D.

Een eidooier geeft je vitamine D, plus de choline, plus het vet dat het naar binnen brengt, plus een dozijn verbindingen waar niemand de moeite heeft genomen om een naam voor te bedenken.

Een calciumtablet geeft je calcium.

Een partje harde kaas geeft je calcium, plus de vitamine K2 die het calcium naar je botten stuurt in plaats van naar je slagaders.

Een visoliecapsule geeft je omega-3, vaak geoxideerd voordat het deksel eraf was.

Een motfilet van makreel geeft je dezelfde omega-3, vers, plus de vitamine D, plus het selenium, plus het eiwit waarin het verpakt arriveerde.

Een ijzertablet geeft je ijzer en twee weken maagpijn.

Een plak rundvlees geeft je ijzer dat je lichaam daadwerkelijk opneemt, plus de B12 die geen plant je kan geven, plus het zink, plus het eiwit om het allemaal aan het werk te zetten.

De tablet draagt de kopnutrient. Het voedsel draagt de nutrient en de instructies voor het gebruik ervan.

Trek één verbinding uit de 20 waarmee het geëvolueerd is en je krijgt de verbinding, niet het resultaat.

Dat is waarom de grote onderzoeken naar enkelvoudige supplementen jaar na jaar met lege handen terugkomen, tot verrassing van iedereen behalve de koe.

Je kunt het ingrediënt in een capsule kopen.
Je kunt het recept niet kopen.

 

[fatsnotbad]

A plant-based diet is a full-time job, and no human has ever been hired for it.

A cow has 4 stomachs, a 150-litre fermentation tank in the first one, and spends 8 hours a day chewing and 8 more chewing it again. About 40,000 jaw movements a day to turn grass into beef.

A gorilla eats 18 kilos of leaves and stems a day, half its waking hours on the job, and runs the lot through a colon that takes up 60% of its gut.

A panda spends 14 hours a day eating 12 kilos of bamboo and digests about a fifth of it. It has the gut of a carnivore and the diet of a lawnmower, and the result is an animal famous for being exhausted.

A koala sleeps 20 hours a day because eucalyptus gives it almost nothing, and has a brain the size of a walnut rattling about in a skull built for something bigger.

An elephant eats for 18 hours and passes half of it undigested.

A horse has 30 metres of gut and will colic and die if it stops moving through.

A rabbit is so bad at it that it eats its own droppings for a second pass.

Every one of those animals carries the equipment. The vat, the extra stomachs, the 30 metres of pipe, the bacteria, the 18-hour shift.

The human has 1 stomach, no vat, 7 metres of gut, no enzyme for cellulose, and finishes dinner in 12 minutes.

Then he is told to eat 30 plants a week and wonders why he is bloated, tired, hungry by 10 and back at the fridge by 11.

He is doing a cow's job without a cow's stomach, on a cow's hours, and the cow at least gets to lie down.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Doctor: "LDL's still 3.1. I'm doubling the statin."

Patient: "My legs ache on the dose I'm on."

Doctor: "Naproxen."

Patient: "For my stomach?"

Doctor: "Omeprazole."

Patient: "For my bones?"

Doctor: "Alendronate. Stand up half an hour after it or it burns the gullet."

Patient: "Which the omeprazole's for."

Doctor: "Which the omeprazole's for."

Patient: "My sugar's gone up since the statin."

Doctor: "It does that. Metformin."

Patient: "Which does?"

Doctor: "Drops your B12. Injections, every twelve weeks."

Patient: "I've put on a stone."

Doctor: "Mounjaro. You qualify now."

Patient: "I'm low. Properly low."

Doctor: "Sertraline."

Patient: "Which does?"

Doctor: "Kills the sex drive."

Patient: "I'm 58 and married."

Doctor: "Sildenafil. Never with the nitrates."

Patient: "What nitrates?"

Doctor: "The ones after the heart attack."

Patient: "What heart attack?"

Doctor: "The one the statin prevents. In one of you per hundred."

Patient: "How many pills is that?"

Doctor: "Nine. Ten with the injection."

Patient: "And if I stopped the statin?"

Doctor: "Your LDL goes back up."

Patient: "To what it was when nothing hurt."

Doctor: "Nothing hurting isn't a clinical endpoint."

Patient: "What is?"

Doctor: "The number. Yours is going to be beautiful."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

On 2 July 1881 the President of the United States was shot in the back at a Washington railway station, survived the bullet, and spent the next 80 days dying of the fingers of the doctors who went looking for it, because American medicine had decided that the Englishman telling them to wash their hands was a crank.

James Garfield had been in office four months. He was walking through the Baltimore and Potomac station with two of his sons, on his way to a summer holiday, when a disappointed office-seeker called Charles Guiteau fired twice. One bullet grazed his arm. The other went into his back, past the spine, and came to rest behind the pancreas, where it could have stayed harmlessly for the rest of his life.

The first doctor to reach him pushed an unwashed finger into the wound on the station floor. Then came the man who would take charge, a well-connected Washington physician whose first name was, genuinely, Doctor. Doctor Willard Bliss probed the wound with his finger and a metal instrument, there on the floor, then took over the President's care and kept rivals away. Over the following weeks a procession of physicians, a dozen or more, worked their fingers and unsterilised probes into the President's back in search of the bullet. They turned a three-inch wound into a channel some twenty inches long, and filled it with infection as they went.

Sixteen years earlier in Glasgow, Joseph Lister had shown that carbolic acid and clean hands stopped surgical wounds from rotting. Europe was adopting it. Lister had crossed the Atlantic in 1876 to explain it to American surgeons, and most of them waved him away. Germs nobody could see were not going to change how a gentleman examined a patient.

Bliss had announced that the bullet lay on the right side. When Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, rushed a new metal detector to the White House, Bliss let him search only the right side. The machine crackled everywhere, set off by the steel springs of a new mattress nobody thought to move.

Garfield had been a big man of over 200 pounds. He wasted to about 130. He burned with fevers, his body filled with abscesses, and in September they carried him to the seaside at Long Branch, New Jersey, for the air. He died there on 19 September.

The autopsy found the bullet on the left side, sealed off in a protective cyst, nowhere near where the doctors had been digging. The track they had followed down his right side was one they had made themselves.

At his trial Guiteau told the court that the doctors had killed the President and he had merely shot him. He was hanged anyway, but on the medicine he had a point, and the profession knew it. American surgeons took up antisepsis within a few years.

Congress refused to pay Bliss most of his bill.

The President's wound needed one thing from the most eminent medical men in the capital, which was to be left alone, and they could not manage it, because the science they had settled on told them the danger was the lead and not their own hands.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

"We could feed 14.5 billion with today's cropland. Why aren't we?"

That is the headline on a new study from Project Drawdown, and it only works if you count pig feed and petrol as dinner.

Paul West and his team added up every calorie grown on the world's cropland, the corn, the soya, the wheat, the rice, the sugar cane and the palm oil, and divided it by what a person needs in a day. Out came 14.5 billion.

Then they followed the calories. Of every 100 grown, 45 are eaten by people, 40 go to livestock and 15 go into fuel and industry. The 40 fed to animals come back as 5 calories of meat, milk and eggs.

So half the world's crop calories are being lost, mostly to livestock, and the remedy is one burger a week.

Now follow their own sum to the end.

To feed 14.5 billion, 7 billion people have to live on the field corn and soybean meal currently fed to pigs, chickens and cattle.

To feed 14.5 billion, they also have to eat the corn and cane grown for ethanol, a crop that exists only because governments order it to.

To feed 14.5 billion, a calorie has to be a calorie. Sugar and seed oil count as food. Protein, B12, iron and zinc never enter the sum.

To feed 14.5 billion, you have to leave two thirds of the world's farmland out of the calculation, because it is pasture, most of it could never grow a crop, and the study counted cropland alone.

To feed 14.5 billion, you have to believe the animals are eating our dinner, when 86% of what livestock eat worldwide is grass, straw, stalks, husks and oilseed cake that no human can digest.

Count only the feed a person could actually have eaten, and cattle and sheep turn every 6 grams of that protein into 10. They hand back more than they take.

The study's own fix is to swap beef for chicken. Chicken eats almost nothing but the corn and soya the study wanted freed up, and pigs and poultry burn 2 grams of edible protein for every 1 they return.

Their model of efficiency is India, which eats 84% of its crop calories directly, as rice, wheat, sugar and seed oil. India has 101 million diabetics, and nearly 3 in 10 of its small children are stunted.

A few paragraphs down, the authors concede that nobody is actually going to eat the feed and the fuel, that it would leave people short of micronutrients, and that nobody would like the taste.

So the finding is that the world could feed 14.5 billion people on a diet its own authors say nobody will eat.

Why aren't we? Because the food in question is pig feed, and the people who wrote the study won't eat it either.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Theodore Roosevelt was 21 when a Harvard doctor examined his heart and told him to take a desk job, avoid all exertion and not so much as run up the stairs, and he went off and climbed the Matterhorn instead.

He had been a sickly child. Asthma attacks left him fighting for breath through the night, his father walking him up and down or driving him through the dark in a carriage to force air into him. His eyes were so poor he had no idea what the world looked like until he was given spectacles at 13. When he was about 12 his father told him he had the mind but not the body, and that he would have to make his body. The family fitted out a gymnasium in the house, and the boy started lifting and pulling and did not stop for the rest of his life.

At Harvard he boxed and rowed. Then in his final year, in 1880, the college's director of physical training, Dudley Sargent, found an irregular heartbeat. The advice was the best medicine of the day: a quiet life, no strenuous exercise, no stairs. Roosevelt is said to have told him he would rather a short life than that one.

He married that autumn and climbed the Matterhorn on his honeymoon. In 1884, after his wife and his mother died on the same day in the same house, he went west to the Dakota Badlands and lived as a cattle rancher, riding, roping and hunting, and once laid out a drunk who had pulled two guns on him in a saloon. In 1898, at 39, he led his volunteer cavalry up Kettle Hill under fire in Cuba. At 42 he was President.

In 1912 a would-be assassin shot him in the chest in Milwaukee. Finding no blood when he coughed, he reasoned the bullet had missed his lung and gave his speech anyway, for the best part of an hour and a half, with the bullet still in him. At 55 he went down an uncharted river in the Amazon.

He died in his sleep in 1919, at 60, after the jungle had nearly finished what the doctor had predicted.

The heart that could not be trusted with a staircase carried him through forty years that would have broken most men twice his size.

Doctors still tell the frail to rest and the old to take it easy. A father told a wheezing boy to build himself a body, and the boy built one that ran a country.

The sound medical advice in 1880 was to sit down. He turned it down, and the result was a large part of the twentieth century.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Psychiatry is a vending machine with a prescription pad. Feeling in, tablet out, ten minutes, next, and not one question about what the brain is running on.

Low? Sertraline, for a serotonin shortage no test has ever found in a living human.

Anxious? Propranolol for the heart, diazepam for the nerves, and nothing for the three coffees and the cereal that set them off.

Can't sleep? Zopiclone. Nobody asks what time the sugar went in.

Can't sit still? Methylphenidate, a stimulant, for a child who had juice and toast for breakfast.

Mood swinging? Lithium, with a blood test every three months for the kidneys it slowly wears out.

Hearing things? Olanzapine, which piles on three stone, and then metformin for the diabetes the olanzapine caused.

Still low? A second antidepressant on top of the first. Then an antipsychotic to boost the two antidepressants.

Seven tablets, three conditions, and the man has still not been asked what he ate yesterday.

The brain is 2% of your weight and burns a fifth of everything you eat. It is the hungriest organ you own, run by billions of cells each packed with mitochondria, the furnaces that make its power.

Feed those furnaces sugar every two hours for thirty years and they clog, misfire and die early. The brain's own insulin resistance has a name in the journals. They call it type 3 diabetes.

Feed them fat instead and the brain runs on ketones, the cleanest fuel it has, which is why neurologists have used a high-fat diet to stop seizures in children for a century, and why the same diet is now putting schizophrenia and bipolar into remission in trials, with the drugs left exactly where they were.

A psychiatrist gets about as many hours of nutrition in training as a plumber. More than half the men who wrote the diagnostic manual had taken money from the firms that make the tablets.

So walk in with three questions. What is my brain running on? What happens to that fuel while I take the tablet? When do I come off it?

Then watch the machine try to give change.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Hunter-gatherers in Tanzania walk as far in a day as you do in a week, and when a team measured it, they burned the same calories as an office worker in London.

The Hadza. Around a thousand of them, in the dry country below Lake Eyasi, still hunting with bows and digging tubers the way people did before the first farm.

The men walk about 11 kilometres a day after game. The women about 6, after roots and berries, with a child on the hip.

In 2012 an anthropologist gave 30 of them water laced with heavy isotopes, the gold standard for measuring how much energy a body burns, and waited.

The men burned around 2,600 calories a day. The women around 1,900.

Adjusted for body size, no different from a European or an American sitting at a desk.

The body has a budget. Spend it on walking and it quietly spends less on everything else. Walk all day and it finds the saving somewhere, and the total barely moves.

There is no obesity among the Hadza. There is no obesity among any people living on what they hunt. And it is not the walking.

Forty years of advice has told you that you are fat because you move less than your grandparents, and sold you a watch to count the difference.

The people who move more than anyone alive burn what you burn. The difference was never the walking. It was always the plate.

You cannot outwalk a bakery. The Hadza would need a bakery to find out.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The first protein powder to sell by the ton was mixed in 1952 by the most famous man in American weightlifting, stirring soy flour and Hershey's chocolate together in a drum with a canoe paddle.

Bob Hoffman owned the York Barbell Company in Pennsylvania, published Strength & Health magazine, coached the American Olympic weightlifting team and called himself the father of world weightlifting, a title nobody else had awarded him. He sold barbells. For years he also told his readers that ordinary food was all a lifter needed.

Then in 1951 a Chicago gym owner called Irvin Johnson began advertising a soy powder in the muscle magazines, Johnson's Hi-Protein Food, and the orders poured in. Hoffman carried the adverts for a few months. In February 1952 Johnson's advert vanished from Strength & Health, and in its place, in the same size tin and the same flavours, appeared Hoffman's High-Protein Food. He soon changed the spelling to Hi-Proteen.

His managing editor, Jim Murray, walked into the back of the building one day and found his boss standing over a fibre drum half full of soy flour, stirring it with a canoe paddle, a tub of Hershey's chocolate beside him. Hoffman tasted it, pulled a face, declared that nobody would buy it, shovelled in more chocolate and went back to stirring.

They bought it by the ton. The York champions went on the boxes. Hoffman wrote in his own magazine that no other single health food was as complete or as near perfect, and boasted that the oil had been pressed out of the beans until less than one percent fat was left.

That is what defatted soy flour is: the residue of a bean crushed for its oil, the stuff the mills sold for animal feed. The product that launched the supplement industry was the leftovers of the soybean oil business, sweetened, in a tin with a champion on it.

In the 1930s the advice to a skinny lad who wanted to grow had been heavy squats and a gallon of milk a day. A generation of lifters built themselves on it.

When York's lifters got suddenly bigger in the early 1960s, the magazine gave the credit to a new isometric training method and to Hi-Proteen. A doctor called John Ziegler had been giving them Dianabol.

The supplement aisle that grew out of that drum now turns over tens of billions a year, and much of what is on it is still a by-product of something else, sweetened, with a physique on the label the powder did not build.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

1900: Everybody cooks in tallow, lard and butter. The word diet means what a person eats.
Obesity rate: 3%.

1911: "It's all vegetable!" Crisco, boiled out of cotton mill waste, goes on sale in a tin.
Obesity rate: 3%.

1948: "The fat on your plate is killing you." A physiologist with a graph and a magazine cover.
Obesity rate: 10%.

1961: "Swap the butter for polyunsaturated oil. Your heart will thank you."
Obesity rate: 13%.

1977: "Eat less fat. Eat more grain. We have thought about this."
Obesity rate: 15%.

1980: "Avoid too much fat, saturated fat and cholesterol." Printed, posted, taught.
Obesity rate: 15%.

1984: "Hold the eggs and butter." A face made of bacon on the front of Time.
Obesity rate: 15%.

1990: "Get the beef tallow out of the fryers." The chips have never tasted the same since.
Obesity rate: 23%.

1994: "Fat free! Eat as much as you like." And they did.
Obesity rate: 25%.

2000: Seed oil is now in the bread, the hummus, the baby formula and the drip. Nobody mentions it.
Obesity rate: 30%.

2010: "Keep saturated fat under 10% of calories." The one food group still falling.
Obesity rate: 36%.

2015: "Replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats." The same sentence, 54 years running, read out by new people.
Obesity rate: 38%.

2020: Seed oil is a fifth of every calorie in America.
Obesity rate: 42%.

2022: "Take the injection." Weekly. For life.
Obesity rate: 42%.

2026: "It's the saturated fat."
Obesity rate: 42%.

Every instruction on that list is still in force today. Not one has ever been withdrawn.

They have never once gone back down the list to see which rung the fire started on.

They just screw the next one on and tell you to keep climbing.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

How long an animal sleeps tells you what it eats, and you sleep like a predator.

A lion sleeps 20 hours a day. One good kill buys it a weekend.

A tiger, 18. A cat, 16. A dog, 14. A bat, 19 hours a day on a diet of pure insect.

A cow sleeps 4 hours. The other 20 are needed to keep the grass going in.

A horse sleeps 3, mostly standing, and a wild horse grazes 16 hours a day to stay alive.

A giraffe gets under 5. An elephant, 2, and that is in a lifetime of walking and eating.

A sheep, 4. A deer, 3. A goat, 5, and it still chews in its sleep.

Dense food buys sleep. Thin food buys a 20-hour shift, because a stomach full of leaves is a stomach that has to be filled again by lunch.

The human sleeps 8 hours, with 1 stomach, no fermenting vat and no night shift, which is a schedule that only an animal on dense food has ever been able to afford.

The insomniac at 3am on a low-fat diet is a grazer who has been handed a predator's rota, and the body has noticed the pantry is thin.

Eight hours of sleep is a carnivore's privilege.

The cow would love to know how you do it.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Take a statin every day for five years, and the big trials say it moves your death back by about three days.

In 2015 three Danish researchers asked the question the statin trials never set out to answer: how much longer do the people taking them actually live?

They took the 11 major statin trials that published survival curves and measured the gap between the people on the pill and the people off it.

Without heart disease, the median gain was 3.2 days.

With heart disease, 4.1 days.

The best result in any trial was 27 days, after almost six years of simvastatin in heart patients.

In ALLHAT, one of the biggest trials of all, the people on the statin died about five days sooner.

The researchers called the gains surprisingly small. The drugs are sold on headlines about cutting heart risk by a third.

The aching muscles come along for the ride, the commonest reason people stop taking them.

So does the raised blood sugar. American labels have warned of it since 2012, and in the JUPITER trial new diabetes ran 25% higher on the drug.

So do the memory loss and confusion, added to the same label the same year.

So do the liver enzymes, which is why the surgery tests your liver before and after you start.

So does the drop in coenzyme Q10, which your heart muscle makes its energy with, because the pill blocks the same pathway that makes your cholesterol.

And at the far end, muscle that breaks down and floods the kidneys. Bayer's statin, Baycol, was pulled worldwide in 2001 after it was linked to 52 deaths.

About 1,800 tablets, one a day for five years, with the aches, the blood sugar and the forgetting, in exchange for a long weekend you might not remember.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

1867: Henri Nestlé, a German pharmacist in Switzerland, starts selling a powdered baby food of milk, flour and sugar for infants who can't be breastfed.

1970s: Nestlé sends saleswomen dressed as nurses into maternity wards across Africa, Asia and Latin America to hand new mothers free formula. By the time the samples run out, the mothers' own milk has dried up.

1974: A British charity publishes a report called The Baby Killer. Babies are dying on formula mixed with dirty water and watered down by mothers who can't afford enough powder.

1977: The boycott starts in America and spreads to Europe.

1981: The World Health Organization votes on a code to stop breast milk substitutes being marketed this way. 118 countries vote for it. The United States votes against.

2005: Nestlé's chairman says on camera that the campaigners who want water declared a human right hold an extreme view.

2015: In the middle of California's worst drought on record, Nestlé is found piping water out of a national forest on a permit that expired in 1988, for $524 a year.

2024: Nestlé pays French prosecutors €2 million after admitting it treated Perrier and Vittel, sold as natural mineral water, with filters the law forbids.

2024: An investigation finds Nestlé adding sugar to its Cerelac baby cereal in India, nearly 3 grams a serving, and around 6 in Africa. The same product in Britain and Germany has none.

A mother's milk, a spring in a forest, a baby's first spoon.

Nestlé's business has always been taking what was free and selling it back with a label.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Amish children have a quarter of the asthma of their genetic cousins the Hutterites, and the difference is how close they live to the cows.

The two communities share European ancestry, Anabaptist roots, big families and plain, strict lives.

The Amish of Indiana farm the old way, on family farms with horses and a dairy herd, and the barn stands a few steps from the house. The children are in and out of it all day.

The Hutterites of South Dakota farm on big communal operations with modern machinery, and the animals are kept away from the homes.

5.2% of Amish schoolchildren have asthma. Among Hutterite children it is 21.3%. The American average sits in between, at about 10%.

In 2016 researchers checked the genes of 60 children from both groups and found them remarkably alike. Then they collected the dust from their homes.

The Amish houses held 6.8 times as much bacterial material, carried in from the animals. Both groups keep tidy homes. The Amish simply live next door to a cow.

The Amish children's blood had more of the immune cells that fight infection, and fewer of the ones that drive allergy.

The researchers then put the dust into the airways of mice primed to develop asthma. The Amish dust protected them. The Hutterite dust did nothing.

One of the scientists admitted you can't put a cow in every family's house.

Every climate plan in Europe is busy moving the cow further away from the child.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Vitamin D was filed under the wrong letter in 1922, and a century of advice has been built on the clerical error.

The scientists who found it were working down the alphabet. A, B, C, and the next thing that cured a disease got D. Nobody checked what it was.

Vitamin C you have to eat, or your gums bleed. B12 you have to eat, or your nerves go. Thiamine you have to eat, or you get beriberi.

Vitamin D you do not have to eat at all, because you are the factory.

Sunlight lands on your skin and turns cholesterol into it. Your liver works on it. Your kidneys finish it. What comes out is calcitriol, a steroid, in the same chemical family as testosterone, oestrogen and cortisol, with a receptor on cells in every organ you own.

It switches genes on and off. Immunity, calcium, muscle, mood, and the clock that tells a cell when to die.

Testosterone was never called vitamin T. Cortisol was never called vitamin K. Nobody has ever told you to top up your oestrogen with a tablet from the chemist and call the matter closed.

But call a hormone a vitamin and it shrinks to a dose. Ten micrograms. One capsule from October. A number to hit on a blood test.

So nobody asked the only question that matters with a hormone, which is why production stopped.

Production stopped because you were told to stop it. Cover up. Stay in the shade. Factor 50 for the walk to the car. The skin cancer campaigns did their job, and the factory went dark.

Then they sold you a capsule to replace the hormone they had just told you not to make.

Then the trials on the capsule came back flat, and the verdict was that the hormone must not matter much after all.

A man told to wear a lead vest and then handed a testosterone pill would have asked a few questions. You were handed a vitamin and told to take it with food.

Misfiled, blocked, bottled, and when the bottle failed, the sun got the blame.



Mike