Cuprum Dea

An egg is the best thing a chicken will ever do, and it still inherits the chicken's problem. A hen has one stomach and no filter, so whatever is in the feed is in the yolk. Feed her corn and soya in a shed and a large egg carries about a gram of linoleic acid. Let her scratch for grass and insects and it carries about half that. A tablespoon of sunflower oil carries nine. A portion of chips fried in it carries as much as ten eggs. So three eggs a day is not where your omega-6 is coming from, unless you fry them in the bottle. The pan was always a bigger problem than the hen. The yolk is the prize: choline, vitamins A, D and K2, DHA, and the cholesterol your body makes its hormones from. The white is the security system, built to stop bacteria reaching the yolk, and it is armed. It carries a protein that locks up biotin, another that blocks your digestive enzymes, and the second most common food allergen in children. Gym culture spent thirty years binning the prize and drinking the security system. Plenty of people who feel off on a meat diet, and blame the meat, turn out to be reacting to the egg white. So buy the pastured ones if it is easy, cook them in butter, and favour the yolk. And never let an egg sit in a steak's seat. It is the best thing in the bird aisle. The bird aisle is still the second division.

Protein is what you are built from. Fat is what you run on. Your body has never once confused the two. It shows in what gets stored. A lean adult carries about 100,000 calories of fat, enough for well over a month. They carry about 2,000 of carbohydrate, enough to reach tomorrow lunchtime. They carry no store of protein at all. Every gram of it is on duty as muscle, organ, enzyme or bone, and the only way to burn any is to dismantle something that was working. It shows in what burning costs. Fat goes into the furnace and comes out as water and breath. Protein has to be stripped first. Every amino acid carries nitrogen, the nitrogen comes off as ammonia, ammonia poisons the brain, and the liver has to turn it into urea before the kidneys can flush it. That line has a top speed. It is reached at roughly a third of your calories, and past it the ammonia backs up. And it shows in the waste. Up to 30% of the energy in protein is spent just processing it. For fat the figure is about 3%. One fuel is stored by the month, burns clean and costs almost nothing to use. The other is not stored, leaves toxic ash and loses a quarter of itself on the way in. Nobody heats a house by burning the walls. You have spent fifty years being told to cut the coal and eat more bricks.

American surgeons pull around 10 million wisdom teeth a year, mostly from teenagers. Jay Friedman, a public health dentist who spent three decades fighting the practice, worked out that at least two-thirds of them were doing no harm whatsoever. The reasoning is an old one. Everybody's go eventually, so have the lot out young, the sound ones with the bad, before they cause trouble. Four at once, usually under a general anaesthetic, followed by a week of soup, ice packs and photographs of chipmunk cheeks. It is so routine that the teenager who keeps all four is the one who gets asked questions. In 2007 Friedman added it all up and called it a public health hazard. About 5 million Americans go under every year, at a cost of over $3 billion. They lose around 11 million days a year to pain, swelling and missed school or work. Tens of thousands are left with lifelong damage, many with a lip, chin or tongue that never gets its feeling back because the drill clipped a nerve. Most of the pain blamed on wisdom teeth, he found, was caused by the surgery. Then came the comparison his profession hated most. The share of wisdom teeth that ever turn nasty is about the same as the share of appendixes that turn into appendicitis, and nobody takes every teenager's appendix out just in case. By his estimate the average oral surgeon in America was making about half a million dollars a year from wisdom teeth. His colleagues called him a traitor. The following year the American Public Health Association came out against pulling healthy wisdom teeth. Britain had got there first. The very first ruling NICE ever issued, in 2000, told dentists to leave healthy wisdom teeth where they were. America carried on, and still does. Wisdom teeth arrive on schedule in every mouth. What has changed is the jaw they are meant to fit into. A jaw grows to the work a child's food gives it, and years of soft, sweet, mushy food build one too small for the teeth it was always going to grow. Impacted wisdom teeth are rare in skulls from before farming. In ours they are a rite of passage. The face shrank to fit the food, and the teeth that no longer fit the face come out at seventeen, as a precaution, at a profit. Every generation finds a new set of teeth to blame for the menu.

A human baby is born fatter than a seal pup, and nearly all of that fat is there to feed one organ. A newborn human is about 15% fat. A newborn baboon is about 3%. No other primate arrives carrying anything close, and the mother spends the last ten weeks of pregnancy laying most of it down. The baby's brain takes more than half of everything the baby burns at rest. Within days of birth a breastfed baby is in ketosis, running that brain partly on fat and building it out of the same material. Breast milk delivers about half its calories as fat. It carries more cholesterol, weight for weight, than the mother has been told is safe for her. It contains almost no starch, because there is nothing in a newborn that could use any. Every mammal on earth weans its young onto the adult diet of the species. The human infant spends nine months being fattened and six more on the fattiest drink its mother can make, and is then handed a spoonful of baby rice.

Helge Ingstad walked out of his own law firm in 1926 to live on caribou with the hunters of the Canadian Arctic, proved at 60 that the Vikings beat Columbus to America, and died at 101. He was 26, a successful attorney in a small Norwegian town, and bored to the bone. He sold the practice, sailed to Canada, and spent four years as a trapper in the Barren Lands east of Great Slave Lake, a good part of it travelling with a band the neighbouring peoples called the Caribou Eaters. They earned the name. The herd came through, they killed, and for months on end the menu was meat, fat, marrow and tongue, with nothing green in sight. He wrote that he had never been in better condition in his life. He came home, wrote a bestseller about it, and was promptly made governor of a slice of East Greenland, then of Svalbard. He went to live among the Apache. He went to live with the inland Eskimo of Alaska, who also ate caribou and very little else, and stayed a winter. Then, in his sixties, he took up a problem the professors had filed under legend. The sagas said Norsemen had reached a land west of Greenland around the year 1000. Ingstad read them as sailing directions, worked along the coast of Newfoundland by boat asking fishermen about old ruins, and in 1960 a man in a village called L'Anse aux Meadows walked him to some grassy bumps by a stream. His wife Anne Stine, an archaeologist, dug them. Eight Norse buildings, a forge, a bronze pin. Five hundred years before Columbus. He was still writing at 100. Every dietary guideline issued in his lifetime would have classed his four formative years as a slow suicide. He outlived the authors of most of them by a comfortable margin, and rewrote the history of a continent on the side.

Mollie Maggia's jaw came away in pieces in her dentist's hands in 1922, and when she died that September, aged 24, her death certificate said syphilis. She had been a dial painter at the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, one of hundreds of young women, most in their teens and early twenties, painting glowing numbers onto watch faces with a paint called Undark. To keep a fine point on the camel-hair brush they were taught to shape it between their lips. Lip, dip, paint, hundreds of dials a day. The supervisors told them radium was harmless, good for them even. The girls painted their nails and teeth with it for fun and walked home glowing in the dark. Then their teeth began falling out. Jaws rotted and snapped. Spines crumbled. Doctors had no name for it, and the company did not offer one. It had one. In 1924, under pressure, it paid Harvard specialists to study the factory, and they reported that radium was the cause. The company sat on the report and let it be known that its workers were in good health. Its own examiner told sick women they were well. When the deaths kept coming, the whispering started that dial painters were loose girls, and that it was syphilis. Grace Fryer began losing her teeth in 1922 and spent two years looking for a lawyer brave enough to take on the company. In 1927 she sued, with four other women, and the papers named them the Radium Girls. That autumn Mollie was dug up to settle the syphilis question. Her bones were radioactive. The company stalled, knowing its accusers were dying, and by the first hearing in January 1928 two of the five could not raise their arms to take the oath. They settled that June for $10,000 each and $600 a year. The judge who brokered the deal turned out to own shares in the company. The man who had invented the paint died of radium poisoning that November. In Illinois, at the Radium Dial Company, Catherine Donohue gave her evidence in 1938 from her sickbed, weighing about five stone, and was dead within months. Her case helped win American workers the right to sue over the diseases their jobs gave them. The women were told they were young and healthy and had nothing to fear, and when they started dying, the company found it easier to attack their virtue than admit what was in its paint. Their graves in New Jersey still set off a Geiger counter.

How long an animal can go without food tells you what it was built to eat, and you can go weeks. A rabbit that stops eating for a day is a vet emergency. Its gut stalls and its liver starts to fail. A pony off its food for a few days can flood its own blood with fat and die of it. A cow needs grass going in around the clock to keep the microbes in her rumen alive. A lion eats up to 40 kilos at a sitting, then nothing for days. A wolf can bolt a fifth of its body weight in one meal, then go a fortnight without. A crocodile can go a year between meals. A pregnant polar bear digs into the snow and goes up to eight months without eating, giving birth and suckling her cubs on the way. An emperor penguin father stands through the Antarctic winter with an egg on his feet and eats nothing for about four months. A human stomach stretches from about a litre to four. A lean human can go about two months without food, living off fat that every other primate barely carries. Hunters in every culture ate until they couldn't move after a kill, and went without until the next one. The body was built to feast and fast like a predator. The diet sheet feeds it like a rabbit, a little every few hours, in case it panics.