Oldmate Warra

"How have you got any energy if you haven't had breakfast?" I've got about two months of fuel strapped round my middle. I'm just using a bit of it. "I thought fat was hard to get at." It is if you keep posting sugar through the letterbox every three hours. The body never has to go to the tank, so it forgets where the tank is. "So you just don't eat at all?" Not until I'm hungry. About one, two o'clock. Then I eat like it's about to be discontinued. "Don't you get shaky?" No. Shaky is what happens when you've had a bowl of cereal at seven and you're coming down off it by ten. I never went up, so there's nothing to come down from. "What about your metabolism, though?" It's a body, not a boiler. It doesn't go out because you missed the toast. "It just sounds a bit disordered, if I'm honest." You eat six times a day, you've got a biscuit drawer, there are cereal bars in your glovebox, and you panic if the eleven o'clock snack is late. Which one of us sounds like he's on a drip? "My dietician says breakfast is the most important meal of the day." Your dietician's quoting a cereal advert from 1917. I'm quoting a lion. The lion skipped breakfast and ate the dietician.

The supermarket chicken is 42 days old, and it's had a hard 6 weeks. Chicken: - 6 weeks in a shed, 19 to the square metre - 2.5kg, legs buckling under its own breast - Over a quarter walk badly by catching day - Fed soy and maize, never a blade of grass - Fat about 5x higher in omega-6 - Breast tastes of whatever you marinated it in - Needs a sauce, a rub and a sprinkle of creatine Mutton: - 5 years on a hill, in all weathers - Walked for every mouthful - Made its own fat from grass - Gram for gram, about 4x the iron, 5x the zinc, 10x the B12 - Fat that stays solid in the pan and crisp on the plate - Tastes of the hill it grew on, with salt - Needs nothing but an oven and time Only one is on the dietician's list, and it's the one that struggles to walk.

Your stomach runs at a pH of about 1.5, which is the acidity of a scavenger, and it does that on purpose. That acid kills most of the bacteria that arrive with your dinner. That acid prises B12 off the protein it comes in, so the body can collect it. That acid releases the iron, calcium, zinc and magnesium locked inside your food. That acid switches on the enzyme that breaks protein into the amino acids you're built from. That acid is the signal that tells the rest of the gut the meal has started. A lion makes it. A vulture makes it. A newborn baby makes it by the first week. Then we declared war on it. England now writes well over 60 million prescriptions a year for pills that switch it off, mostly for heartburn from a diet of bread, pastry and seed oil. Around 15 million Americans are on the same pill. Low B12 is now so common in long-term users that the regulators warn about it. Hip fractures rise in people who take it for years, because calcium stops being absorbed. Gut infections rise, because nothing is killing what comes in. A fifth of users were never told to stop, so the war on stomach acid has become a lifetime subscription. The stomach spent two million years learning to make it, and we switched it off for a sandwich.

Surgeon: "Gallstones. Until we take it out, I want you on a low fat diet. Nothing fried, no cheese, no cream, skimmed milk." Patient: "What does the gallbladder do?" Surgeon: "Stores bile. Squirts it out to digest fat." Patient: "When?" Surgeon: "When fat arrives." Patient: "And if no fat arrives?" Surgeon: "It sits." Patient: "Full of bile. Not emptying. For months." Surgeon: "That's the idea. Rest it." Patient: "What do stones form from?" Surgeon: "Bile that sits too long and thickens." Patient: "So the treatment for a bag that's gone solid from not emptying is to stop emptying it." Surgeon: "The fat triggers the pain." Patient: "The fat triggers the squeeze. The pain is the stone in the door." Surgeon: "Which is why we're removing it." Patient: "What was I eating when the stones formed?" Surgeon: "I'd have to look." Patient: "Low fat. Since 2019. The slimming club." Surgeon: [does not look] Patient: "I've been resting it for six years. It's the best rested organ I own."

1908: a Smithsonian doctor examines around 2,000 Native Americans still living on game and finds exactly two cases of cancer, in a population where a modern doctor would expect hundreds. 1913: a missionary doctor arrives in Gabon, examines thousands of patients a year living on fish and game, and reports he could not find a single case of cancer. 1920s: a doctor working among Labrador's Inuit on seal, fish and caribou sees no cancer, no appendicitis and no heart disease in a decade, and then watches all three arrive with the trading post. 1935: the first cancer in a Canadian Inuit population is recorded at that post, within a generation of the shop opening. 1964: a cardiologist tests 400 Masai warriors on milk, blood and meat and cannot find a single heart attack, in men eating more saturated fat than anyone in America. 1990: a Swedish doctor examines every adult on the island of Kitava and finds not one stroke, not one heart attack and not one case of diabetes among 2,300 people who have never opened a packet. 2026: half of British people born after 1960 will get cancer, and heart disease kills more people than anything else on earth. The diseases we're told are the price of living longer were so rare in people living on the animal that doctors crossed oceans to confirm it, and came back with the same empty notebook every time. Each of them was told it was a coincidence, and each of those populations was then given the shop. Nobody has ever had to ship cancer to a people. A sack of flour and a drum of seed oil are lighter, and between them they do the job.