Jamie

1774: they blew tobacco smoke up drowning victims' backsides to revive them, and the kits hung along the Thames like lifebuoys. 1863: they sold cocaine wine as a daily tonic, and a pope pinned a gold medal on it. 1898: they sold heroin as a cough medicine, and spooned it into coughing children. 1918: they sold radium water as a health drink, and the millionaire who drank 1,400 bottles was buried in a lead-lined coffin with most of his jaw gone. 1921: they put lead in petrol, and Britain kept it in the pumps until 2000. 1930s: they X-rayed children's feet in shoe shops, and kids queued to watch their toes wiggle on the screen. 1940s: they rubbed mercury teething powder into babies' gums, and about 1 in 500 of those babies was poisoned. 1946: they sold cigarettes on the line that more doctors smoked their brand, and put a man in a white coat on the advert. 1949: they gave the lobotomy a Nobel Prize, and doctors went in through the eye socket with an ice pick. 1952: they sold a cigarette filter made of asbestos as the greatest health protection in smoking history, and smokers drew it into their lungs with every puff. 1957: they sold thalidomide to pregnant women for morning sickness, and around 10,000 babies were born with missing or shortened limbs. 1960s: they sold margarine as the heart-healthy fat, and spread trans fat on a generation's toast. 1996: they sold OxyContin as barely addictive, and started an overdose epidemic. 1999: they sold Vioxx for sore joints, and pulled it five years later after tens of thousands of heart attacks. 2026: they're selling seed oil as the heart-healthy fat, and it's in almost every packet in your kitchen. Every one of these came with an expert's blessing and the same total certainty. The people telling you which fat to fear today sit in the same chairs as the ones who put radium in the water and a doctor on the cigarette packet, and they're every bit as sure. "The experts recommend it" has the longest body count in medicine.

Constipation on carnivore means you've gone lean, and the cure is the thing the diet was supposed to be built on in the first place. Meat is almost entirely absorbed. There's very little left over to pass, so a carnivore going once a day or once every two days, comfortably, isn't constipated. That's what happens when food stops being mostly packaging. The bran that used to bulk everything out was never doing you a favour; it was a cargo you paid to carry through. The actual complaint, hard, dry, an effort, is a different thing, and it has one cause. Fat. Fat is what moves the gut. A fatty meal tells the gallbladder to empty, bile goes in, and bile is the body's own laxative, which is why a pound of lean steak sits like a brick and the same steak with the cap on and a knob of butter melting over it goes through like it was expected. Lean mince, chicken breast, egg whites and a tin of tuna is a plate with the plumbing turned off, and the person eating it blames the meat. So the fix is never fibre and never a sachet. It's the butter you were told to leave off, the 20% instead of the 5%, cream in the coffee, the fat cap eaten first. Within a day or two the problem has gone, and it stays gone as long as the plate shines. Which is the point. A diet of meat only works when the fat is on it. Take the fat off and you have a bodybuilder's cut with worse manners, and the gut is the first thing to file a complaint. Carnivore is high fat by definition. The bathroom is where people find that out.

Every language that ever had to survive a winter remembers which food was the prize, and which one was the insult. The best of anything: - The fat of the land - The cream of the crop - The land of milk and honey - Kill the fatted calf - Living high on the hog - Bring home the bacon The worst of anything: - A vegetable, for someone whose brain has gone - A couch potato - Small potatoes - Not worth a bean - Paid peanuts - A turnip, for a failed England manager Nobody ever promised a people a land of lentils and oats. The phrases were written by people who knew hunger, and they were never confused about which food meant you had made it.