Jeroenski
Well-known member
Gewoon rauwe melk drinken dus, dan krijg je genoeg van de bacterieën van de koe binnen.
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- Onderwerp starter Medusa
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Gewoon rauwe melk drinken dus, dan krijg je genoeg van de bacterieën van de koe binnen.
Medusa
Well-known member
Fruit wordt verkocht als het meest natuurlijke voedsel op aarde. Het meeste van wat in je fruitschaal ligt, bestond 300 jaar geleden niet, en niets ervan was ooit bedoeld om dagelijks te eten.
De supermarkt-aardbei werd geboren in een Franse tuin in de jaren 1750, een kruising tussen een bes uit Chili en een uit Virginia. De wilde variant is zo groot als een erwt.
De wilde banaan zit zo vol met pitjes dat er nauwelijks iets te eten aan is. Degene in je schaal is een pitloze kloon die niet eens kan voortplanten.
De blauwe bes werd pas in 1916 gecultiveerd.
Op een schilderij uit de 17e eeuw is een in plakjes gesneden watermeloen vooral bleke vruchtvlees en zaden.
Elk van hen is gekweekt tot groter, zoeter en zachter dan wat je voorouders ooit plukten.
En in het wild is fruit er slechts een paar weken per jaar. Je appel in juni werd vorige herfst geplukt en in een zuurstofarme opslag in slaap gehouden. Je banaan werd in een pakhuis met gas rijp gemaakt. Je blauwe bessen in januari kwamen vliegend uit Peru.
In de natuur heeft die paar weken fruit één taak: vet opslaan voor de winter. Beren vreten zich vol aan herfstbessen tot ze vet genoeg zijn om door te slapen tot de lente.
De suiker in fruit is vooral fructose. Je lever zet een groot deel ervan direct om in vet, en je hersenen tellen het nauwelijks mee als voedsel. Toen Yale de hersenen van mensen scande, kalmeerde glucose de hongercentra. Fructose deed dat niet.
Essentieel is het evenmin. De Inuit kwamen de Arctische winters door zonder een enkel stuk fruit en kregen nooit scheurbuik, omdat vers vlees de vitamine C leverde.
Fruit was een paar weken herfst. De supermarkt maakte er herfst van het hele jaar, en de winter komt nooit.
De supermarkt-aardbei werd geboren in een Franse tuin in de jaren 1750, een kruising tussen een bes uit Chili en een uit Virginia. De wilde variant is zo groot als een erwt.
De wilde banaan zit zo vol met pitjes dat er nauwelijks iets te eten aan is. Degene in je schaal is een pitloze kloon die niet eens kan voortplanten.
De blauwe bes werd pas in 1916 gecultiveerd.
Op een schilderij uit de 17e eeuw is een in plakjes gesneden watermeloen vooral bleke vruchtvlees en zaden.
Elk van hen is gekweekt tot groter, zoeter en zachter dan wat je voorouders ooit plukten.
En in het wild is fruit er slechts een paar weken per jaar. Je appel in juni werd vorige herfst geplukt en in een zuurstofarme opslag in slaap gehouden. Je banaan werd in een pakhuis met gas rijp gemaakt. Je blauwe bessen in januari kwamen vliegend uit Peru.
In de natuur heeft die paar weken fruit één taak: vet opslaan voor de winter. Beren vreten zich vol aan herfstbessen tot ze vet genoeg zijn om door te slapen tot de lente.
De suiker in fruit is vooral fructose. Je lever zet een groot deel ervan direct om in vet, en je hersenen tellen het nauwelijks mee als voedsel. Toen Yale de hersenen van mensen scande, kalmeerde glucose de hongercentra. Fructose deed dat niet.
Essentieel is het evenmin. De Inuit kwamen de Arctische winters door zonder een enkel stuk fruit en kregen nooit scheurbuik, omdat vers vlees de vitamine C leverde.
Fruit was een paar weken herfst. De supermarkt maakte er herfst van het hele jaar, en de winter komt nooit.
Your gallbladder needs about 10 grams of fat in one sitting to empty properly, and a low-fat diet that never gives it that is how a person ends up on a surgeon's list.
The gallbladder is a small bag under the liver that stores bile, and bile is how you digest fat. When fat reaches the gut, a hormone called CCK tells the bag to squeeze, and it empties into the intestine. It only does the job properly when there is enough fat to justify it, and the threshold researchers work to is around 10 grams in a meal.
Below that, the bag barely moves. The bile sits there and thickens, and the cholesterol in it starts to crystallise the way anything does in still water. Crystals become sludge, and sludge becomes stones.
In 1996 a group of dieters were put on a 520-calorie plan with under 2 grams of fat a day, and another group on 900 calories with 30 grams, including one 10-gram meal put there for no reason except to make the gallbladder empty. Four of the six on the fat-free plan grew gallstones. None of the seven on the fatty plan did, and the trial was stopped early on ethical grounds.
Women grow gallstones at about twice the rate men do, and they are also the most likely to have spent twenty years on skimmed milk, egg-white omelettes and chicken breast.
So give it the signal every day, in one meal with real fat in it. Ten grams is two whole eggs, a thick slice of cheddar, or a thumb of butter on the steak. A ribeye with the cap on gives it four or five times that, and the bag empties clean.
If yours is still in there, it is asking to be used. Use it.
Mike
The gallbladder is a small bag under the liver that stores bile, and bile is how you digest fat. When fat reaches the gut, a hormone called CCK tells the bag to squeeze, and it empties into the intestine. It only does the job properly when there is enough fat to justify it, and the threshold researchers work to is around 10 grams in a meal.
Below that, the bag barely moves. The bile sits there and thickens, and the cholesterol in it starts to crystallise the way anything does in still water. Crystals become sludge, and sludge becomes stones.
In 1996 a group of dieters were put on a 520-calorie plan with under 2 grams of fat a day, and another group on 900 calories with 30 grams, including one 10-gram meal put there for no reason except to make the gallbladder empty. Four of the six on the fat-free plan grew gallstones. None of the seven on the fatty plan did, and the trial was stopped early on ethical grounds.
Women grow gallstones at about twice the rate men do, and they are also the most likely to have spent twenty years on skimmed milk, egg-white omelettes and chicken breast.
So give it the signal every day, in one meal with real fat in it. Ten grams is two whole eggs, a thick slice of cheddar, or a thumb of butter on the steak. A ribeye with the cap on gives it four or five times that, and the bag empties clean.
If yours is still in there, it is asking to be used. Use it.
Mike
Only a fat animal can be properly aged, and that is the real reason most supermarket beef tastes of so little.
Dry ageing is the oldest trick in butchery. The meat hangs in a cold room at a degree or two above freezing, with air moving across it, for three weeks or more, and two things happen. The meat's own enzymes slowly break down the muscle fibres, so it turns tender. Water evaporates out of it, so the flavour concentrates, until at five or six weeks it tastes deep, nutty and almost like cheese. It loses a fifth or more of its weight to drying and trimming along the way, which is part of why it costs what it does.
The thing that makes it possible is the fat. The cap of fat on the outside is the animal's own jacket. It keeps the meat underneath from drying to leather, and it lets a rib hang for weeks. A lean carcass with a thin covering cannot go the distance. Hang it and it dries out, darkens and wastes away into trim before it gets anywhere good. So the lean beef the market has demanded since the 1980s is beef that cannot be aged the old way, and it gets rushed through instead.
That is where the word matured comes in. Unless the pack says dry-aged, matured usually means wet-aged: sealed in a vacuum bag and left in a chiller for a few weeks. It goes a bit more tender, the bag keeps all the water in, and none of the flavour arrives.
At the butcher, ask three things. Is it dry-aged, how many days, and is it on the bone? A butcher who dry-ages will usually show you the cabinet, and every rib in it will be wearing a thick white coat, because no other kind is worth the room.
The fat was never only the flavour. It bought the time for the flavour to happen.
Mike
Dry ageing is the oldest trick in butchery. The meat hangs in a cold room at a degree or two above freezing, with air moving across it, for three weeks or more, and two things happen. The meat's own enzymes slowly break down the muscle fibres, so it turns tender. Water evaporates out of it, so the flavour concentrates, until at five or six weeks it tastes deep, nutty and almost like cheese. It loses a fifth or more of its weight to drying and trimming along the way, which is part of why it costs what it does.
The thing that makes it possible is the fat. The cap of fat on the outside is the animal's own jacket. It keeps the meat underneath from drying to leather, and it lets a rib hang for weeks. A lean carcass with a thin covering cannot go the distance. Hang it and it dries out, darkens and wastes away into trim before it gets anywhere good. So the lean beef the market has demanded since the 1980s is beef that cannot be aged the old way, and it gets rushed through instead.
That is where the word matured comes in. Unless the pack says dry-aged, matured usually means wet-aged: sealed in a vacuum bag and left in a chiller for a few weeks. It goes a bit more tender, the bag keeps all the water in, and none of the flavour arrives.
At the butcher, ask three things. Is it dry-aged, how many days, and is it on the bone? A butcher who dry-ages will usually show you the cabinet, and every rib in it will be wearing a thick white coat, because no other kind is worth the room.
The fat was never only the flavour. It bought the time for the flavour to happen.
Mike
On 30 October 1924, within days of five men dying raving at a refinery in New Jersey, the inventor of leaded petrol called a press conference in Manhattan, poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, held the bottle under his nose and breathed it in for a full minute to prove how safe it was.
Thomas Midgley was a General Motors engineer, and in 1921 he had cured the knock that was holding back the car engine. A few drops of tetraethyl lead in the tank and the fuel burned smoothly. General Motors and Standard Oil set up the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to sell it, with DuPont making it, and kept the word lead out of the name.
The men making it knew better. At Standard Oil's Bayway plant they called the building the loony gas building. Workers got lost on a site they had walked for years, then started hallucinating. One of them, Ernest Oelgert, ran through the plant screaming that three of them were coming at him at once, and was dead the next day. Within a week five were dead and more than 30 in hospital. At DuPont's works in Deepwater men had been dying since 1923. Midgley himself had spent a long holiday in Miami the year before, recovering from lead poisoning.
So the company blamed the men. Gloves and masks had been provided and they had not worn them. And Midgley washed his hands in the stuff for the reporters and told them he was taking no chances whatever.
New Jersey shut the plant. A federal committee sat for a few months and let production resume. The industry paid its own toxicologist, Robert Kehoe, who spent the next forty years insisting that lead in the human body was natural and that nobody had proved petrol made it worse.
It took a geochemist dating the age of the earth, Clair Patterson, to find lead contaminating everything he tested and to show it had arrived with the motor car. America banned leaded petrol for road vehicles in 1996. Britain followed in 2000. By then it had been in the blood of every child on earth for seventy years, taking points off their intelligence.
Midgley went on to invent the CFCs that tore open the ozone layer. In 1940 he caught polio and rigged a harness of ropes and pulleys to haul himself out of bed. In 1944 he was found strangled in it.
The man who tells you the product is safe is very often the man who invented it, and he will always wash his hands in it for the cameras.
Mike
Thomas Midgley was a General Motors engineer, and in 1921 he had cured the knock that was holding back the car engine. A few drops of tetraethyl lead in the tank and the fuel burned smoothly. General Motors and Standard Oil set up the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to sell it, with DuPont making it, and kept the word lead out of the name.
The men making it knew better. At Standard Oil's Bayway plant they called the building the loony gas building. Workers got lost on a site they had walked for years, then started hallucinating. One of them, Ernest Oelgert, ran through the plant screaming that three of them were coming at him at once, and was dead the next day. Within a week five were dead and more than 30 in hospital. At DuPont's works in Deepwater men had been dying since 1923. Midgley himself had spent a long holiday in Miami the year before, recovering from lead poisoning.
So the company blamed the men. Gloves and masks had been provided and they had not worn them. And Midgley washed his hands in the stuff for the reporters and told them he was taking no chances whatever.
New Jersey shut the plant. A federal committee sat for a few months and let production resume. The industry paid its own toxicologist, Robert Kehoe, who spent the next forty years insisting that lead in the human body was natural and that nobody had proved petrol made it worse.
It took a geochemist dating the age of the earth, Clair Patterson, to find lead contaminating everything he tested and to show it had arrived with the motor car. America banned leaded petrol for road vehicles in 1996. Britain followed in 2000. By then it had been in the blood of every child on earth for seventy years, taking points off their intelligence.
Midgley went on to invent the CFCs that tore open the ozone layer. In 1940 he caught polio and rigged a harness of ropes and pulleys to haul himself out of bed. In 1944 he was found strangled in it.
The man who tells you the product is safe is very often the man who invented it, and he will always wash his hands in it for the cameras.
Mike
In one of the most famous heart studies on earth, the people with the "bad" cholesterol turned out to have the sharpest minds.
Framingham, Massachusetts, has been measuring its residents' hearts since 1948.
In 2005 researchers took 1,894 of them, with 16 to 18 years of cholesterol readings on file, and tested their memory, attention, reasoning and word fluency.
The higher the cholesterol, the better they scored.
The people at the "desirable" level, under 200, did worse than the people the guidelines call borderline high. And worse than the people the guidelines call high.
In Gothenburg, Swedish researchers followed 392 people from the age of 70 to 88. Those with the highest cholesterol at 70 had about a third of the dementia risk of those with the lowest.
The brain holds about a quarter of all the cholesterol in the body, and builds the connections between its cells out of it.
In 2012 the FDA had the statin labels changed. Memory loss and confusion had been reported, and patients were to be told.
The drug for the number that came with the better memory now carries a line about losing your memory.
Mike
Framingham, Massachusetts, has been measuring its residents' hearts since 1948.
In 2005 researchers took 1,894 of them, with 16 to 18 years of cholesterol readings on file, and tested their memory, attention, reasoning and word fluency.
The higher the cholesterol, the better they scored.
The people at the "desirable" level, under 200, did worse than the people the guidelines call borderline high. And worse than the people the guidelines call high.
In Gothenburg, Swedish researchers followed 392 people from the age of 70 to 88. Those with the highest cholesterol at 70 had about a third of the dementia risk of those with the lowest.
The brain holds about a quarter of all the cholesterol in the body, and builds the connections between its cells out of it.
In 2012 the FDA had the statin labels changed. Memory loss and confusion had been reported, and patients were to be told.
The drug for the number that came with the better memory now carries a line about losing your memory.
Mike
People put on a statin start eating more, and their weight climbs three times faster than everyone else's.
Between 1999 and 2010 the share of American adults taking a statin more than doubled, to about one in six.
UCLA researchers went through a decade of national nutrition surveys and compared the people on statins with the people who weren't.
In 1999 the statin users were the careful ones. They ate about 180 calories a day less than everybody else, and less fat.
By 2010 the gap had gone.
Over the decade the statin users' calories rose 9.6%. Their fat intake rose 14.4%. The people not on statins barely changed.
The statin users' body mass index went up more than three times as fast.
The lead author's explanation was that patients stopped bothering with the diet once the pill was bringing the number down, and he said doctors prescribe statins to cut risk, not to free patients to put "butter on steaks".
So the drug sold to prevent heart attacks came with a fatter, hungrier patient attached, and the profession's biggest worry was the butter.
Some of us manage the butter on the steak without the prescription.
Mike
Between 1999 and 2010 the share of American adults taking a statin more than doubled, to about one in six.
UCLA researchers went through a decade of national nutrition surveys and compared the people on statins with the people who weren't.
In 1999 the statin users were the careful ones. They ate about 180 calories a day less than everybody else, and less fat.
By 2010 the gap had gone.
Over the decade the statin users' calories rose 9.6%. Their fat intake rose 14.4%. The people not on statins barely changed.
The statin users' body mass index went up more than three times as fast.
The lead author's explanation was that patients stopped bothering with the diet once the pill was bringing the number down, and he said doctors prescribe statins to cut risk, not to free patients to put "butter on steaks".
So the drug sold to prevent heart attacks came with a fatter, hungrier patient attached, and the profession's biggest worry was the butter.
Some of us manage the butter on the steak without the prescription.
Mike
The potato is being sold as a health food again, and the only healthy thing about it has ever been the fat poured over it.
It is a nightshade. It is about 80% water, and the rest is starch that hits your blood faster than table sugar does. For 450 years it has been the thing beside the meat, and not one cuisine on earth has made it worth eating without animal fat.
Chips in beef dripping. Roasties in goose fat. Mash beaten with half a pack of butter and hot cream. Dauphinoise, which is a pint of cream with some potato in it. Aligot, so heavy with cheese it stretches a yard off the spoon. Latkes in schmaltz, boxty in bacon fat, champ with a well of melted butter in the middle, and the jacket potato that nobody in history has ever eaten dry.
Europe did not want it. It arrived from the Andes in the 1570s, grew underground, belonged to the same family as deadly nightshade, and spent the best part of two centuries as pig feed. Frederick the Great had to order Prussia to plant it in 1756, and Russian peasants rioted when they were made to.
They had a point. The potato defends itself with solanine, a nerve toxin packed into the skin, the eyes, the sprouts and any patch gone green. In 1979, 78 schoolboys in south London were poisoned by a school dinner of potatoes that had been stored too long, and 17 of them ended up in hospital.
The Irish labourer of the 1840s ate up to 14 pounds of potatoes a day and stood taller than the English recruits beside him in the army. The part always left out is the buttermilk he drank with them by the quart, and the butter whenever he could get it. It was the dairy doing the nourishing, with the potato as ballast. When the crop failed in 1845, a million people died while Irish cattle and butter went on being shipped to England.
On its own, the starch in a medium jacket potato comes apart into roughly nine teaspoons' worth of glucose, and it starts doing so in your mouth.
For a lean, active person with a steak in front of them, a potato roasted in dripping is a pleasant way to eat more dripping. For somebody carrying three stone they cannot shift, with a liver that has been fielding glucose since breakfast for thirty years, it is a sugar surge in a cardigan, and calling it a whole food is how they stay stuck.
The potato was never the meal. It earned its seat at the table on the strength of what ran off the meat, and that is still the only seat it deserves.
Mike
It is a nightshade. It is about 80% water, and the rest is starch that hits your blood faster than table sugar does. For 450 years it has been the thing beside the meat, and not one cuisine on earth has made it worth eating without animal fat.
Chips in beef dripping. Roasties in goose fat. Mash beaten with half a pack of butter and hot cream. Dauphinoise, which is a pint of cream with some potato in it. Aligot, so heavy with cheese it stretches a yard off the spoon. Latkes in schmaltz, boxty in bacon fat, champ with a well of melted butter in the middle, and the jacket potato that nobody in history has ever eaten dry.
Europe did not want it. It arrived from the Andes in the 1570s, grew underground, belonged to the same family as deadly nightshade, and spent the best part of two centuries as pig feed. Frederick the Great had to order Prussia to plant it in 1756, and Russian peasants rioted when they were made to.
They had a point. The potato defends itself with solanine, a nerve toxin packed into the skin, the eyes, the sprouts and any patch gone green. In 1979, 78 schoolboys in south London were poisoned by a school dinner of potatoes that had been stored too long, and 17 of them ended up in hospital.
The Irish labourer of the 1840s ate up to 14 pounds of potatoes a day and stood taller than the English recruits beside him in the army. The part always left out is the buttermilk he drank with them by the quart, and the butter whenever he could get it. It was the dairy doing the nourishing, with the potato as ballast. When the crop failed in 1845, a million people died while Irish cattle and butter went on being shipped to England.
On its own, the starch in a medium jacket potato comes apart into roughly nine teaspoons' worth of glucose, and it starts doing so in your mouth.
For a lean, active person with a steak in front of them, a potato roasted in dripping is a pleasant way to eat more dripping. For somebody carrying three stone they cannot shift, with a liver that has been fielding glucose since breakfast for thirty years, it is a sugar surge in a cardigan, and calling it a whole food is how they stay stuck.
The potato was never the meal. It earned its seat at the table on the strength of what ran off the meat, and that is still the only seat it deserves.
Mike
On 30 December 1945 a ship docked at Avonmouth with the first bananas Britain had seen in five years, and the children who met it understood fruit better than we do now.
The Tilapa had come in from Jamaica. The Lord Mayor of Bristol went down to the docks to greet it, and so did a crowd of children, most of whom had never held a banana in their lives. Imports had stopped in 1940 to save shipping space for what the country needed to survive the war, and for five years the banana simply was not there. Nobody died of its absence.
When bananas came back, they came back as a treat. They went to the children first, and plenty of those children had to be shown how to peel one.
That was fruit for most of British history. An orange in the toe of a Christmas stocking, the most exciting thing in it. A bowl on the sideboard for when visitors came. Apples off the tree in autumn and stewed until they ran out, jam to carry the summer through the winter, strawberries for a fortnight in June and then gone for another year. Fruit was the pudding, the present, the bit of sweetness the season allowed. It was never the meal.
The meal was the joint, the dripping, the eggs, the milk on the step every morning.
Within one lifetime it turned upside down. A banana is now the first solid food a baby is handed. Grapes ride in the buggy, the smoothie counts as a portion, and fruit gets offered to children five times a day as if it were medicine, while the fat on the joint is the thing they are warned about.
The children on the dock at Avonmouth were handed a banana and told it was a treat. They were right, and we have spent eighty years forgetting it.
Mike
The Tilapa had come in from Jamaica. The Lord Mayor of Bristol went down to the docks to greet it, and so did a crowd of children, most of whom had never held a banana in their lives. Imports had stopped in 1940 to save shipping space for what the country needed to survive the war, and for five years the banana simply was not there. Nobody died of its absence.
When bananas came back, they came back as a treat. They went to the children first, and plenty of those children had to be shown how to peel one.
That was fruit for most of British history. An orange in the toe of a Christmas stocking, the most exciting thing in it. A bowl on the sideboard for when visitors came. Apples off the tree in autumn and stewed until they ran out, jam to carry the summer through the winter, strawberries for a fortnight in June and then gone for another year. Fruit was the pudding, the present, the bit of sweetness the season allowed. It was never the meal.
The meal was the joint, the dripping, the eggs, the milk on the step every morning.
Within one lifetime it turned upside down. A banana is now the first solid food a baby is handed. Grapes ride in the buggy, the smoothie counts as a portion, and fruit gets offered to children five times a day as if it were medicine, while the fat on the joint is the thing they are warned about.
The children on the dock at Avonmouth were handed a banana and told it was a treat. They were right, and we have spent eighty years forgetting it.
Mike
Name one thing a seed oil gives you.
Flavour? It's deodorised at the refinery so you can't taste it.
Nutrients? Stripped out in refining. The vitamin E is caught in the deodoriser, sold on, and comes back to you in a capsule.
Cooking? Heat it and it oxidises. That's the smell of a fryer.
Tradition? Barely a century old. The first seed oils were factory waste looking for a buyer.
Fullness? Nobody has ever been satisfied by a spoonful of rapeseed oil.
Natural? Most of it is pulled out of the seed with hexane, a petroleum solvent, then bleached and deodorised.
What it does have is a low price for the factory, a long shelf life for the supermarket, and a slightly lower LDL on a blood test.
And for that, grown adults spend their evenings online with meta-analyses, defending the contents of a KFC fryer as if it were their nan.
Butter has never needed a defence. Neither has dripping, or olive oil, or the fat on a lamb chop.
The only thing seed oil has ever given anyone is permission: to keep the crisps, the takeaway and the meal deal, and call it heart-healthy.
Mike
Flavour? It's deodorised at the refinery so you can't taste it.
Nutrients? Stripped out in refining. The vitamin E is caught in the deodoriser, sold on, and comes back to you in a capsule.
Cooking? Heat it and it oxidises. That's the smell of a fryer.
Tradition? Barely a century old. The first seed oils were factory waste looking for a buyer.
Fullness? Nobody has ever been satisfied by a spoonful of rapeseed oil.
Natural? Most of it is pulled out of the seed with hexane, a petroleum solvent, then bleached and deodorised.
What it does have is a low price for the factory, a long shelf life for the supermarket, and a slightly lower LDL on a blood test.
And for that, grown adults spend their evenings online with meta-analyses, defending the contents of a KFC fryer as if it were their nan.
Butter has never needed a defence. Neither has dripping, or olive oil, or the fat on a lamb chop.
The only thing seed oil has ever given anyone is permission: to keep the crisps, the takeaway and the meal deal, and call it heart-healthy.
Mike
Sardinia is sold as a Blue Zone of beans and red wine. The men who made it famous were shepherds living on sheep's milk and cheese.
In 1999 two demographers, Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, drew blue circles on a map around mountain villages in the Ogliastra, where men were reaching 100 at a rate almost unheard of anywhere on earth. It is one of the few places where men come close to matching women.
When Pes went looking for the reason, he compared the long-lived villages with the rest of the island using records from the early 20th century. Most of the dietary measures showed no difference at all. What stood out was pastoralism: the villages where the men spent their lives walking steep mountain paths behind sheep and goats.
They lived on what the flocks gave them. Pecorino, goat's milk, sheep's milk, a cheese ripened in a young goat's stomach. In Villagrande a 91-year-old still gets up before dawn to milk his sheep and turn it into cheese.
Then the books arrived, and the Netflix series, and the official Blue Zones food guidelines telling you to eat 95% plants.
The longest-lived men in Europe spent their lives walking behind animals and drinking what came out of them. The book turned them into a bean recipe.
Mike
In 1999 two demographers, Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, drew blue circles on a map around mountain villages in the Ogliastra, where men were reaching 100 at a rate almost unheard of anywhere on earth. It is one of the few places where men come close to matching women.
When Pes went looking for the reason, he compared the long-lived villages with the rest of the island using records from the early 20th century. Most of the dietary measures showed no difference at all. What stood out was pastoralism: the villages where the men spent their lives walking steep mountain paths behind sheep and goats.
They lived on what the flocks gave them. Pecorino, goat's milk, sheep's milk, a cheese ripened in a young goat's stomach. In Villagrande a 91-year-old still gets up before dawn to milk his sheep and turn it into cheese.
Then the books arrived, and the Netflix series, and the official Blue Zones food guidelines telling you to eat 95% plants.
The longest-lived men in Europe spent their lives walking behind animals and drinking what came out of them. The book turned them into a bean recipe.
Mike
John Keats was 25 and dying of tuberculosis in Rome in the winter of 1820 when his doctor put him on a diet of one anchovy and a piece of bread a day, bled him after he coughed up blood, and went on to become physician to Queen Victoria.
Keats had trained as a surgeon and apothecary himself. In February 1820, coughing in bed in Hampstead, he looked at the blood on the sheet, recognised it as arterial, and told his friend it was his death warrant. His mother and his brother Tom had both died of consumption. He was told to escape the English winter, and in September he sailed for Italy with the young painter Joseph Severn.
In Rome they were met by James Clark, a young Scottish doctor building a practice among the English. Clark decided the trouble lay in Keats's stomach, brought on by too much mental exertion, and prescribed riding and fresh air. When the bleeding came in December he took more blood, to relieve the inflammation, and then cut the food. To slow the flow of blood to the stomach, the most gifted young poet in England was to live on a single anchovy and a morsel of bread a day.
Keats was starving and begged Severn for food. The laudanum he had brought to end it if the pain became too much was taken off him. He died on 23 February 1821, in the room above the Spanish Steps, wasted to almost nothing, and asked that his gravestone carry no name, only that here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Clark went home and flourished. In 1837 he became physician to the young Queen Victoria and was made a baronet. Two years later a lady-in-waiting, Flora Hastings, developed a swollen belly, and Clark told the court she was pregnant. She was unmarried and a virgin, and the scandal badly damaged the new Queen. When Lady Flora died that summer, the post-mortem found a tumour on her liver.
Within a few decades the sanatoriums of Europe were treating consumption with the opposite of Clark's diet: rest, mountain air, and as much milk, eggs and meat as the patients could get down.
The doctor who starved a dying poet was given the most prestigious practice in the kingdom.
Being wrong at the top of medicine has never once disqualified anybody. It has only ever cost the patient.
Mike
Keats had trained as a surgeon and apothecary himself. In February 1820, coughing in bed in Hampstead, he looked at the blood on the sheet, recognised it as arterial, and told his friend it was his death warrant. His mother and his brother Tom had both died of consumption. He was told to escape the English winter, and in September he sailed for Italy with the young painter Joseph Severn.
In Rome they were met by James Clark, a young Scottish doctor building a practice among the English. Clark decided the trouble lay in Keats's stomach, brought on by too much mental exertion, and prescribed riding and fresh air. When the bleeding came in December he took more blood, to relieve the inflammation, and then cut the food. To slow the flow of blood to the stomach, the most gifted young poet in England was to live on a single anchovy and a morsel of bread a day.
Keats was starving and begged Severn for food. The laudanum he had brought to end it if the pain became too much was taken off him. He died on 23 February 1821, in the room above the Spanish Steps, wasted to almost nothing, and asked that his gravestone carry no name, only that here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Clark went home and flourished. In 1837 he became physician to the young Queen Victoria and was made a baronet. Two years later a lady-in-waiting, Flora Hastings, developed a swollen belly, and Clark told the court she was pregnant. She was unmarried and a virgin, and the scandal badly damaged the new Queen. When Lady Flora died that summer, the post-mortem found a tumour on her liver.
Within a few decades the sanatoriums of Europe were treating consumption with the opposite of Clark's diet: rest, mountain air, and as much milk, eggs and meat as the patients could get down.
The doctor who starved a dying poet was given the most prestigious practice in the kingdom.
Being wrong at the top of medicine has never once disqualified anybody. It has only ever cost the patient.
Mike
In the spring of 1952 the most powerful woman in South America was given a lobotomy in secret, in a makeshift operating theatre in her own residence with an armed guard on the door, and it stayed a state secret for almost sixty years.
Eva Perón was 33. She had come from nothing, the illegitimate daughter of a village on the pampas, a radio actress who married the colonel who became president and made herself the voice of Argentina's poor. Millions worshipped her. The generals loathed her. In 1951 she was dying of cervical cancer, and nobody told her.
Not even about the surgery. That November an American cancer surgeon, George Pack, was flown in and brought into the theatre only once she was under anaesthetic, so she would never know a foreigner had operated on her. The cancer came back anyway and spread. By the next spring she was in constant agony, sleepless, raging at the people around her, and her speeches had turned savage. She was talking about arming workers' militias.
Juan Perón sent to Boston for James Poppen of the Lahey Clinic, a neurosurgeon who used the lobotomy on patients in intractable pain. According to Poppen's scrub nurse, interviewed decades later, he first practised the operation on prisoners in Buenos Aires, at Perón's request, before he went to work on her. Two holes were drilled in her skull and the front of her brain was cut.
On 4 June Perón was sworn in for his second term, and Evita rode beside him in the open car, waving to the crowds. She weighed almost nothing. A frame hidden under her long fur coat held her upright.
She grew quiet, then stopped eating. She died on 26 July 1952, and Argentina queued for days to file past her body.
Even the body was given no peace. After the army overthrew Perón in 1955 it was stolen, smuggled to Italy and buried in a Milan cemetery under another woman's name, where it lay for fourteen years.
In 2011 an Argentine neurosurgeon at Yale, Daniel Nijensohn, went back to the X-rays the military had taken of her skull. There were the burr holes, exactly where a lobotomy goes in. He later argued in a neurosurgery journal that the operation was meant to change her behaviour as much as her pain.
The woman who had spoken for millions was quietened by her husband and a visiting surgeon, in her own house, and nobody asked her.
Joseph Kennedy did it to an inconvenient daughter. Juan Perón did it to an inconvenient wife. Both times it was called care.
Mike
Eva Perón was 33. She had come from nothing, the illegitimate daughter of a village on the pampas, a radio actress who married the colonel who became president and made herself the voice of Argentina's poor. Millions worshipped her. The generals loathed her. In 1951 she was dying of cervical cancer, and nobody told her.
Not even about the surgery. That November an American cancer surgeon, George Pack, was flown in and brought into the theatre only once she was under anaesthetic, so she would never know a foreigner had operated on her. The cancer came back anyway and spread. By the next spring she was in constant agony, sleepless, raging at the people around her, and her speeches had turned savage. She was talking about arming workers' militias.
Juan Perón sent to Boston for James Poppen of the Lahey Clinic, a neurosurgeon who used the lobotomy on patients in intractable pain. According to Poppen's scrub nurse, interviewed decades later, he first practised the operation on prisoners in Buenos Aires, at Perón's request, before he went to work on her. Two holes were drilled in her skull and the front of her brain was cut.
On 4 June Perón was sworn in for his second term, and Evita rode beside him in the open car, waving to the crowds. She weighed almost nothing. A frame hidden under her long fur coat held her upright.
She grew quiet, then stopped eating. She died on 26 July 1952, and Argentina queued for days to file past her body.
Even the body was given no peace. After the army overthrew Perón in 1955 it was stolen, smuggled to Italy and buried in a Milan cemetery under another woman's name, where it lay for fourteen years.
In 2011 an Argentine neurosurgeon at Yale, Daniel Nijensohn, went back to the X-rays the military had taken of her skull. There were the burr holes, exactly where a lobotomy goes in. He later argued in a neurosurgery journal that the operation was meant to change her behaviour as much as her pain.
The woman who had spoken for millions was quietened by her husband and a visiting surgeon, in her own house, and nobody asked her.
Joseph Kennedy did it to an inconvenient daughter. Juan Perón did it to an inconvenient wife. Both times it was called care.
Mike
A lamb with a gut full of worms will walk past the good grass to eat a bitter plant that kills them, and the only place it ever learned which plant was at its mother's side.
Researchers at Utah State University spent years watching this, because nobody believed it. They took lambs carrying a heavy load of stomach worms and offered them two feeds. Plain alfalfa, which a lamb loves. And alfalfa laced with tannins, the bitter, mouth-drying compound that makes stewed tea undrinkable and that happens to be hard on gut parasites. Healthy lambs barely touched the bitter one. Why would they.
The wormy lambs started eating it. Then preferring it. They ate more of the medicine the sicker they were, and their worm counts fell. Then the researchers dosed them with a proper wormer, the parasites went, and the lambs went straight back to the plain feed. They took the medicine while they were ill and stopped when they were cured, which is more than can be said for most of the people in a pharmacy queue.
The second part is the one that should keep a dietitian up at night. They put lambs on a heavy, bitter diet and offered them a compound that neutralises the bitterness. Lambs that fed alongside their mothers learned to take it. Lambs taken away from their mothers never touched it. Not once. The knowledge of what to eat when something is wrong was being handed down at the trough, ewe to lamb, by example, and a lamb without its mother simply never got the lesson.
Shepherds have known a version of this for as long as there have been shepherds. The sick ewe that goes off on her own to the hedge bottom and eats something she ignores the rest of the year. The flock that heads for the rough corner of the field in a wet spring. Nobody wrote it down because it was obvious.
In 1928 a doctor in Chicago let babies choose their own food from a tray, and the one with rickets drank cod liver oil until his bones healed and then stopped. It is the same experiment, with wool on.
Meanwhile the human version of the lamb is handed a plate diagram, a list of recommended portions and a leaflet on overriding cravings, and told the instinct is the thing that needs managing.
The lamb was never given a diagram.
It had its mother, a hedge, and enough sense to stop taking the tablets when it was better.
Mike
Researchers at Utah State University spent years watching this, because nobody believed it. They took lambs carrying a heavy load of stomach worms and offered them two feeds. Plain alfalfa, which a lamb loves. And alfalfa laced with tannins, the bitter, mouth-drying compound that makes stewed tea undrinkable and that happens to be hard on gut parasites. Healthy lambs barely touched the bitter one. Why would they.
The wormy lambs started eating it. Then preferring it. They ate more of the medicine the sicker they were, and their worm counts fell. Then the researchers dosed them with a proper wormer, the parasites went, and the lambs went straight back to the plain feed. They took the medicine while they were ill and stopped when they were cured, which is more than can be said for most of the people in a pharmacy queue.
The second part is the one that should keep a dietitian up at night. They put lambs on a heavy, bitter diet and offered them a compound that neutralises the bitterness. Lambs that fed alongside their mothers learned to take it. Lambs taken away from their mothers never touched it. Not once. The knowledge of what to eat when something is wrong was being handed down at the trough, ewe to lamb, by example, and a lamb without its mother simply never got the lesson.
Shepherds have known a version of this for as long as there have been shepherds. The sick ewe that goes off on her own to the hedge bottom and eats something she ignores the rest of the year. The flock that heads for the rough corner of the field in a wet spring. Nobody wrote it down because it was obvious.
In 1928 a doctor in Chicago let babies choose their own food from a tray, and the one with rickets drank cod liver oil until his bones healed and then stopped. It is the same experiment, with wool on.
Meanwhile the human version of the lamb is handed a plate diagram, a list of recommended portions and a leaflet on overriding cravings, and told the instinct is the thing that needs managing.
The lamb was never given a diagram.
It had its mother, a hedge, and enough sense to stop taking the tablets when it was better.
Mike
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