maczter

When doctors go on strike, the death rate falls. It has been measured every time it has happened. Israel, 1973: doctors strike for a month. Deaths in Jerusalem drop by half. The undertakers notice first. Los Angeles, 1976: surgeons strike for 5 weeks over insurance. The county death rate falls, then climbs back to normal the week they return and the postponed operations begin. Israel again, 1983 and 2000. Same result. Bogotá, 1976. Same. A review of every strike on record found that mortality either stayed flat or went down. Not once did it rise. Here is why. Medical error is the third leading cause of death in America, after heart disease and cancer, at around 250,000 a year. It does not appear on a death certificate because there is no box for it. In Britain, 1 hospital admission in 16 is caused by a reaction to a drug the patient was correctly prescribed. Properly prescribed medicines, taken as directed, kill about 100,000 Americans a year. That figure is 30 years old and nobody has updated it, because nobody is paid to. The hospital is one of the most dangerous buildings a well person can enter, and the most dangerous thing in it is the pad. So the next time your doctor is on strike, do what the data says and stay home, eat a steak and have a lie down. Statistically it is the safest appointment you will get all year.

"So I quit carnivore. My body just told me it needed carbs." What were you eating at the end? "Lean steak, mostly. Chicken. Egg whites. I was cutting." Any fat? "I'd trimmed it back. For the physique." Fasting? "Till noon. Sometimes 2pm." How did you feel? "Exhausted. Cold. No sleep. Cravings like you wouldn't believe." That's rabbit starvation. It's in the trapper's manuals from 200 years ago. Belly full of lean meat, body running out of fuel. "It was my body asking for carbs." It was your body asking for fat. You took the fat off the plate, and when it got desperate it asked for the nearest fuel it could think of, which is the one you spent your twenties eating. "Honey fixed it." Butter would have fixed it. So would the cap you binned. "I think carnivore is just unsustainable for most people." You didn't do carnivore. You did a bodybuilding cut with the rice removed and called it the diet. "You sound dogmatic." Six years. Fatty mince, eggs, butter, never hungry, never once dreamt about bread. What did you dream about? "Bread." There's your study.

Kale, as advertised: - Vitamin K - Vitamin A - Iron - Calcium - Protein - Antioxidants Kale, in reality: - K1 only. Clots blood. The K2 that keeps calcium out of arteries is in cheese and yolk. - Beta-carotene, not vitamin A. Most people convert almost none of it. - Plant iron. Absorbed at a tenth the rate of the iron in a steak. - Calcium, delivered with goitrogens that block the thyroid from using iodine. - 3g of protein per 100g, and not the amino acids that build anything. - Antioxidants: the plant's own pesticides, still active when they reach you. - Thallium. Kale pulls it out of the soil better than almost any crop grown. - Dacthal on 60% of it, a pesticide Europe banned in 2009. - Mustard oils, assembled in your mouth on the first bite. That is the bitterness. - The compound that gives cattle anaemia on a kale field. Farmers dose the herd first. A cow cannot run away. A kale plant cannot either. So it did what every plant that is rooted to the spot does, and spent a few million years turning itself into something that hurts to eat. The bitterness is the warning. The goitrogen is the punishment. The thallium is what it found lying around and decided to keep. An 88-year-old woman in New York ate a kilo of raw brassica a day for months to keep her blood sugar down. She was found in a coma with her thyroid shut off. Nothing had gone wrong with the plant.

Flu season starts the same week everyone begins three straight months of eating sugar, and nobody thinks to connect the two. 31 October, the children come home with a bucket of sweets each and work through it by bedtime. 5 November brings toffee apples and bonfire toffee. 1 December, the advent calendar opens, a chocolate every morning before school for 24 days. By mid-December there's a tin of Celebrations on every desk in every office in the country, and a selection box eaten before Christmas breakfast. Then, around New Year, flu peaks. In 1973 a team of researchers in California gave volunteers 100g of sugar, roughly what's in three cans of cola, and then drew their blood. They were watching the neutrophils, the white blood cells that act as your first responders and swallow bacteria whole. Within two hours, the neutrophils' ability to swallow bacteria had fallen by about half. Five hours later it still hadn't recovered. It made no difference whether the sugar came as table sugar, honey or orange juice. The same glass of orange juice you're handed the moment you start sniffling was in the test. Plain starch didn't do it. Neither did going without food for 60 hours. So we spend the darkest months knocking our first line of defence flat several times a day. Then we blame the weather.

Blaming cholesterol for heart disease is blaming the delivery van for the fire in the warehouse. LDL is a van. It carries fat, cholesterol and fat-soluble vitamins to every cell that orders them, and it is parked outside a damaged artery for the same reason a van is parked outside a building site: something needed delivering. That is the whole case against it. The van was there. Nobody asked what was in the back. What is in the back is the fat you ate. Pack the van with saturated fat and nothing happens on a hot day, because saturated fat has no double bond and cannot catch. Pack it with linoleic acid, which has two, and the load goes rancid in the heat, sets the van alight, and the fire spreads into the wall it was parked against. Linoleic acid is the seed oil. The fryer, the loaf, the spread, the sauce. So the vans are on fire, and the loading bay has been filling them with the same oil since 1911. The answer was a tablet to take vans off the road. Fewer deliveries. Same cargo. Same fires.