Common Weal Agnes 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🐭

Dairy is the best thing on carnivore and the first thing to pull when something's wrong, and most people do it the other way round. What each one carries: - Butter: fat, almost nothing else - Double cream: 48% fat, nearly no lactose - Hard cheese: fat, protein, next to no lactose - Soft cheese: some lactose - Yoghurt: some lactose, cultured - Milk: about 5% lactose, a glass is a dose - Raw milk: the same sugar, the living version So butter, cream and hard cheese sit at one end, where almost nobody has a problem, and milk sits at the other, where the trouble lives. The test when something's off, a stall, a skin flare, bloating, a joint that's playing up: drop the dairy for a fortnight, every drop of it, and watch. If nothing changes, put it back and stop worrying. If something changes, bring it back from the top of the list down, butter first, milk last, and find out where the line is. Most people's line is milk. Most people's problem was pasteurised milk, and raw milk is where I'd start again. Nobody needs to give up butter. Nobody has ever needed to give up butter.

Shein adds about 4,700 new styles to its site every day, and the end of the line for clothes like that is a beach in Ghana where the sand has grown tentacles. 82% of what Shein makes starts life as fossil fuel. Last November Greenpeace sent 56 Shein garments and shoes to a lab. Of those, 18 broke EU chemical limits, three of them children's clothes, and the waterproof jackets carried PFAS at up to 3,300 times the limit. A dress like that gets worn twice and goes in a charity bag. What the charity can't sell is pressed into bales, and a great many go to Kantamanto in Accra, the biggest second-hand clothes market in the world. About 15 million used garments land in Ghana every week. Traders buy the bales blind, cut the string, and something like 40% is rubbish before it's touched a hanger. Around 100 tonnes a day leaves the market as waste. When Greenpeace tested the clothes on Accra's dumps, 89% had plastic in them. Some goes on the tip, where old clothes have built up into cliffs with layers like rock. Some goes into Korle Lagoon, and the rains flush the lagoon out to sea. The sea brings it back. On Jamestown beach the tide buries it in the sand and twists it into ropes, tentacles of cloth that start on the beach and carry on under the waves. Last year reporters found M&S, Primark, H&M, Zara and Next clothing dumped in the Densu Delta, where endangered leatherback turtles nest. And some of it gets burned. In Old Fadama the public washhouses heat their water over fires of old clothes, and the air inside carried benzene at almost 200 times Germany's indoor guideline. People wash in water boiled over somebody else's wardrobe. Chile has its own version. What won't sell from the free port at Iquique gets dumped in the Atacama, and the pile can be photographed from space. There are Christmas jumpers in it. Shein knows where all this goes. In 2022 Xu Yangtian's company pledged $50 million over five years to a fund for Kantamanto's waste workers. On the first of September it floated in Hong Kong and raised about $1.7 billion, enough to pay that pledge for 170 years. Meanwhile a ewe in Powys grows one coat a year. Scientists left wool and polyester in seawater for 90 days, and the sea got stuck into the wool and barely touched the polyester. Jamestown beach is what the sea does with the stuff it won't eat.