Customer: "No veal, thanks. I know what happens to the calves." Butcher: "So do I. Which bit do you know?" Customer: "Crates. Taken off the mother, kept in the dark, can't turn round." Butcher: "Banned here in 1990. This one had straw, a shed, and other calves to annoy for eight months. Rose veal, we call it. Pink, not white." Customer: "It's still a baby cow." Butcher: "It's a dairy bull calf. Where do you think they went before people bought veal?" Customer: "Reared for beef?" Butcher: "A Holstein bull doesn't make beef worth the feed. For years the answer was a bolt in the head at a day old. Tens of thousands a year, in this country, shot in the pen because nobody would eat them. The industry only promised to stop that a couple of years ago." Customer: "That's horrific." Butcher: "That's the price of a latte. Every pint of milk needs a cow in calf every year, and half the calves are boys." Customer: "So eating the veal..." Butcher: "Gives him eight months in a shed instead of eight minutes. The customer who won't touch veal and buys a flat white has made a choice. She just didn't get told what it was." Customer: "I'll take a kilo." Butcher: "Good. And the next person who tells you veal is cruel, ask them what they take in their coffee."

Six months into carnivore the blood test comes back and the surgery rings you in, and the number they're ringing about is the one that matters least. What they'll say: your cholesterol has gone up. In a lean person eating fat it usually does, because the body is moving fat around in the blood to burn it, and the particles that carry it get counted as LDL. What they won't mention: - Triglycerides: down, often by half - HDL: up - HbA1c: down, into the range the cereal never reached - Fasting insulin: down, if anyone bothered to measure it - CRP: down - Blood pressure: down - Liver enzymes: down The ratio that predicts a heart attack best on a standard panel is triglycerides divided by HDL, and carnivore drives it one way: towards the floor. The seven-minute appointment reads one line of the sheet and hands you a statin for it. Take the full print-out home. The sheet tells the story the appointment didn't have time for, and the first line is the only one that went in a direction the surgery recognises as bad.

University debate: "Fruit and honey were the staples of the human evolutionary diet." Nutritionist: "We're primates. Primates eat fruit. Our colour vision evolved to spot it, our sweet tooth evolved to want it, and the Hadza in Tanzania still get a sixth of their calories from honey. Sugar is ancestral." Anthropologist: "What month is it in your ancestral forest?" Nutritionist: "Sorry?" Anthropologist: "Wild fruit comes in a window. A few weeks, then it's over. What's the fruit-eater doing in the other forty-five?" Nutritionist: "Finding other fruit." Anthropologist: "At latitude fifty, in January, forty thousand years ago, with the glacier a day's walk north. Name the orchard." Nutritionist: "Humans evolved in Africa." Anthropologist: "And left it. We've been in Europe and Siberia for forty-five thousand years, through an Ice Age, on nothing you'd recognise as a banana. The mammoth was the fruit." Nutritionist: "The Hadza prove honey is a staple." Anthropologist: "The Hadza climb thirty feet up a baobab, smoke out a hive, get stung half to death and come down with a comb full of grubs. They eat the grubs. Bee larvae are fat and protein. The honey is the wrapping, and it's a few weeks a year, on the equator." Nutritionist: "It's still sugar, and they thrive on it." Anthropologist: "So does a bear. He eats every berry on the mountain in September and sleeps till April. Fruit is how an animal gets fat on purpose before the food runs out. Our liver still does exactly that with fructose. You've taken a seasonal fattening switch and left it pressed down for twelve months." Nutritionist: "Our sweet tooth is proof we were built for it." Anthropologist: "Your sweet tooth is one receptor. You've got twenty-five for bitter, because most of what grows wants to poison you. A tongue built for fruit would be a tongue that could taste more than one of them." Nutritionist: "What about the apple? The grape?" Anthropologist: "The wild apple is a crab the size of a marble and tastes of battery. The wild banana is seeds held together by spite. Everything on your fruit bowl was bred in the last few thousand years to be a sweet nobody's ancestor ever met." Moderator: "Closing statements." Nutritionist: "Sugar from fruit is natural, ancient, and the body was designed to enjoy it." Anthropologist: "The body was designed to enjoy it for three weeks and then go hunting. You've skipped the hunting and kept the three weeks going since 1980." [The nutritionist had brought a banana. It stayed in the bag.]