Keith Robertson 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🍖 🥩

Hector stood through the saluting guns for seventeen years, and on Thursday night in a field in Denbighshire he nearly went through a fence over a village firework display, and the reason he did not is a donkey and a goat. The farmer knew something the forums do not. A Cavalry Black is not calm about bangs. He is trained about bangs, which is a different thing. Every gun that ever went off at Hector's shoulder had a man on his back and a line of horses either side of him and a rule, and the rule was that the world was not ending and he was to stand, and he stood, because he had decided to believe the man. Four years ago the man got off and did not get back on. The shoes came off. The coat went woolly. The horse let down, which is what everybody wanted for him, and what nobody says is that letting down means the rule goes too. So the first rocket went up over the hill at ten past seven, with no man, no line and no rule, and Hector came off the shelter wall like a horse half his age with his tail over his back and his eye white and twenty two years of discipline nowhere in him at all. He went for the fence. A horse in fright runs at the gap, and the gap in that field is the bottom corner where the wire meets the hedge, and the farmer was already over the gate with the headcollar knowing he was forty yards too far away to matter. Nelson got there first. Nobody saw him move. Nobody ever does. One moment the donkey was in his dry corner and the next he was standing in the bottom corner of the field, square, chest to the horse, exactly where half a tonne of Cavalry Black was going to arrive, the way he once stood where a colicking horse wanted to drop so that the horse had to stay up. He did not bray. He did not flinch. He stood in the one place the horse had to go through, and the horse, who has never in four years gone through Nelson, stopped. Hector stood in front of him, blowing, shaking down the whole length of himself, with the sky going green behind the hill. The second rocket went up. The horse's head went up with it and his weight went back onto his heels, and the donkey put his nose against the horse's chest and left it there. That is the whole of what a donkey does. He does not spend adrenaline. He has a lifetime's supply because he has never dipped into it for anything that did not concern the hay, and when the animal he has decided is his herd is coming apart, he simply stands next to it and declines to come apart as well, and the horse reads the donkey, because a horse takes his reading of the world off whatever is standing beside him, and what was standing beside him had read the sky and found it beneath comment. And above both of them, on the ridge of the field shelter, a goat. Keith had not moved. An Anglo-Nubian from a mountain where the sky does what it likes, standing on a roof with his feet planted and his ears forward, watching a firework display the way he watches a latch, with interest and no fear whatsoever, because nothing in the valley was a gate and nothing in the valley was his problem. He stood on that roof through the whole forty minutes like a sentry who had not been told the war was on. So the horse stood between them. A donkey at his chest who would not move and a goat above him who would not move, the two most ungovernable animals in Britain, and a war horse who had lost his rule found the only two things in the field that still had one, and borrowed it. He shook for twenty minutes. Then he shook less. When the big one went up at the end and the valley lit white, his head came up and his weight went back, and the donkey's nose stayed on his chest, and he stayed. The farmer stood at the fence with the headcollar and did not go in. There was nothing wrong with the horse that a headcollar addressed. He said afterwards that he had watched that horse stand for the guns on the television years before he owned him, with a trooper in a breastplate telling him the world was fine, and that on Thursday he watched him do it with nobody on his back for the first time in his life, and that it was harder, and that it was better. They were in the shelter by nine. Nelson in his corner, standing, ears out, on. Hector lying flat in the doorway with his legs into the yard, asleep inside ten minutes, the way a horse sleeps when he has been frightened and the thing he trusts is on its feet. The goat came down off the roof at some point in the dark and the farmer does not know when, and this morning there was a goat shape in the straw on the horse's other side, and a goat back on the roof pretending there was not. Seventeen years he stood because he was told to. On Thursday he stood because of who was standing with him. The farmer has put the headcollar back on the hook and says he is not sure he will take it down again.

Melanoma is blamed on the sun, and it keeps turning up where the sun has never been. It turns up on the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands, and in darker skin that is where most of it starts. It turns up under the nails. Bob Marley's started under the nail of his big toe, and killed him at 36. It turns up inside the eye, most of it behind a lens that soaks up the ultraviolet before it arrives. It turns up in the mouth, the nose, the bowel and the genitals, where daylight has never fallen once. It turns up more on the trunk than on the face and arms that take the weather, and the US Navy found its sailors with indoor jobs getting more of it than civilians. It turns up most in offices. Britain's own figures put professionals and administrators at the top, and found outdoor work carried no extra risk at all. A cancer of the sun that prefers the dark. In 1980 a Sydney skin doctor called Mackie put melanoma and polyunsaturated fat in the title of one paper. His country had spent the 1970s swapping its butter for polyunsaturated margarine on medical advice. In 1987 he took the body fat of 100 melanoma patients and 100 people without it. The patients carried more polyunsaturated fat, and Sydney's body fat held far more linoleic acid than when the same test was run in 1975. Sweden followed 29,518 women for 20 years. The non-smokers who kept out of the sun lived about as long as the smokers who sat in it. Melanoma grows under toenails, behind eyes, in people who work indoors and in bodies whose fat came out of a bottle. The advice is still factor 50 and a hat.

Every person who quit carnivore gets held up as proof the diet does not work, and the people holding them up have confused a diet with a lifestyle. The diet works. It works on most people who give it a month, because a plate built on ruminant meat and its fat is the nearest thing on earth to what the species was eating when it grew the brain reading this. The weight moves, the joints quieten, the gut settles, the skin clears, the head comes back. None of that is in dispute among people who have done it, including the ones who stopped. What stops them is never the biology. It is the life around the plate. The holiday, the wedding season, the family that wants pasta on a Friday, the sheer novelty of eating a thing other people stare at. That is a problem of temperament and circumstance, and it is a real one, and it has nothing to do with whether the food did its job. Coming off a course of antibiotics early does not prove the antibiotics failed. A cast taken off at six weeks does not mean bones cannot heal. So stop asking whether you could do this forever. Nobody asked you to. Ask whether you can do it for sixty days. Because that is what it is at minimum: the factory reset. Every plant compound, every seed oil, every packet, every sugar, out of the house in one move, and the body given nothing but the food it was built on while it clears the inflammation, repairs what it has been too busy to repair, and remembers how to feel hunger and fullness without a label telling it when. You cannot buy that in a clinic. It costs the shopping and a bit of nerve. Where you go after that is yours. Some stay, and six years in I can tell you the boredom never arrives. Some add the potato back and keep the ribeye at the centre, which is still a better diet than the one they left. Some drift all the way back, and even they drift back from a higher floor, with a body that now knows what good feels like and will keep nudging them toward it. The people who stopped were not failed by the food. They were finished with it. Those are different words, and the diet was never on trial for the second one. Run the reset. Then decide what you want to be.

Seed oils are in your crisps. Fried in a vat of the stuff, nobody is surprised, carry on. Seed oils are in your chips. Same vat. No notes. Seed oils are in your mayonnaise, which is at least honest, since mayonnaise is oil with an egg for company. Seed oils are in your bread. Every loaf. Flour, water, yeast, salt, and a slug of rapeseed nobody asked for. Bread managed 6,000 years without it. Seed oils are in your hummus. It was chickpeas. It is now chickpeas and rapeseed, with a painting of an olive on the front doing the lying. Seed oils are in your tin of sardines, drowning the one good thing left in the cupboard. The fish came out of the sea perfectly oiled. They added more. Seed oils are in the "olive oil", topped up with the cheap stuff and sold at the olive price, which the rest of the world calls fraud. Seed oils are in the healthy aisle, which is now the greasiest aisle in the shop. Seed oils are in the baby formula. The first meal a human ever eats, and it is already 40% sunflower and soy. We start them young. Seed oils are in the drip. Too ill to eat, so they run soybean oil into your vein, and nobody reads you the label because you are unconscious. Then the clever bit. Seed oils are in the chicken and the pork, because we feed it to them, and an animal with one stomach wears its dinner in its own fat. So there is no swap left. No aisle, no back shelf, no label long enough to get you out. Except one. Put the same feed in front of a cow and her rumen hydrogenates the lot before a drop of it reaches the steak. Four stomachs, quietly doing your shopping for you.

Rep: "I'd like to present a new intervention for type 2 diabetes." Panel: "Mechanism?" Rep: "Removes the substrate. Blood glucose falls because nothing's arriving." Panel: "Efficacy?" Rep: "In a 2-year trial, just over half the patients had no diabetes at the end of it. Two thirds of the ones on insulin came off it entirely." Panel: "Adverse events?" Rep: "A headache in week one. Some constipation, resolved by increasing the dose of the fatty component." Panel: "Cost per patient?" Rep: "Negative. One Southport practice that ran it spent £68,000 a year less on diabetes drugs than its neighbours." Panel: "Patent?" Rep: "None. Expired about 2 million years ago." Panel: "Manufacturer?" Rep: "Any cow." [The panel confers.] Panel: "I'm sorry?" Rep: "Steak, eggs, butter, and no bread. That's the compound." Panel: "We can't appraise a diet." Rep: "You appraise a pill that lowers a number. This lowers the number, the dose, the bill and the waiting list." Panel: "There's no sponsor." Rep: "There's a butcher. He's outside with the samples."

In 2007 a vegetarian professor at Stanford put 311 overweight women on four famous diets for a year, fully expecting the Atkins diet to come last, and it beat the other three on everything he measured. Christopher Gardner, by his own account a vegetarian for decades, ran the trial because he wanted the question settled. Four groups. Atkins, the low-carb diet the medical profession had spent 30 years calling dangerous. Ornish, the near-vegan low-fat diet the profession adored. The Zone. And LEARN, the official calorie-counting guidance. Premenopausal women, overweight or obese, a year each, measured at the end. Weight lost. Atkins 4.7 kilos. The official guidance 2.6. The near-vegan diet 2.2. The Zone 1.6. Blood pressure. Atkins came down furthest. Triglycerides. Atkins lowest. HDL, the number cardiologists call good. Atkins highest. LDL, the number the whole fear was built on. No worse on Atkins than on the others. The women eating the most fat and the least bread lost the most weight and finished with the best blood, and the diet built on beans and grain finished near the bottom of a table its own authors had designed. Gardner published it in the journal of the American Medical Association and said in public that he had been surprised. The diet sheet in the clinic the women were recruited from was still the low-fat one. The vegetarian ran the fairest test anybody had ever run on the butter. The butter won. He went back to his beans, and so did the sheet.

Most people who tell me carnivore didn't work for them learned it from the first wave of meatfluencers, and that first wave couldn't have told you where the fat was on a cow. They were busy with the organs. Nose to tail or you weren't serious. Raw liver eaten to camera like a dare. Heart, kidney, spleen, a bull's testicle for the thumbnail. And at the end of every sermon, the freeze-dried organ capsules, discount code in the description. Strange how the gospel always finished at a checkout. Fat got a line, if it got anything. That's the diet upside down. Take away the carbohydrate and fat is the fuel, the only fuel left. Protein builds you; it was never meant to run you. The trappers of the north had a name for living on lean meat alone: rabbit starvation. Pounds of it a day, and they wasted away with full stomachs. So the beginners did exactly as they were shown. Sirloin with the white trimmed off. Chicken breast. A palmful of capsules and a glass of water. By week three they were exhausted, blocked up, ravenous and dreaming about toast. Back to the bread they went, telling everyone carnivore had nearly killed them. They never tried carnivore. They tried lean protein and pills, then blamed the cow. That's the mess I spend most of my week cleaning up. - Buy the cut with the most white on it. - Treat butter as a food, not a garnish. - Pour the fat from the pan back over the meat. - Tip what's left in the pan into a mug and drink it. Nobody in six years has ever quit carnivore because there was too much butter on the plate. They quit because there wasn't enough.

A British five-year-old is now shorter than a five-year-old in North Korea. In 1985 British five-year-olds ranked 69th in the world for height. By 2019 the girls had fallen to 96th and the boys to 102nd. A British boy of five is shorter than one in North Korea, in Haiti and in Libya. A Dutch boy of five stands 7cm taller than him. A Bulgarian boy stands 8cm taller. The experts blamed austerity. Bulgaria has a fraction of Britain's money. It also has its name on the bacteria in your yoghurt, and its children grow up on yoghurt and white cheese. Dutch children grow up on milk with lunch and cheese on their bread. British children get the Eatwell plate. A third of it starch, cereal at breakfast, semi-skimmed from the age of two, red meat cut back, and a fruit pouch for being good. British boys of five have grown about a centimetre since 1985. Thirty years of telling children to eat more starch and less fat, and the rest of the world walked straight past them.

Humans carry the stomach acid of a vulture, and the scientists who measured it had filed us as omnivores. In 2015 a team from North Carolina State gathered every reliable measurement of stomach acidity they could find, across 68 species of birds and mammals, and lined each one up against what the animal eats. The pattern was clean. Herbivores had the weakest acid. The most specialised plant-eaters went further and grew a separate fermenting chamber, kept alkaline so the microbes breaking down leaves could live in it. Among primates, only one family of leaf-eating monkeys ever built one. Carnivores had stronger acid. Scavengers, the animals eating meat already crawling with bacteria, had the strongest of all. The white-backed vulture sits around pH 1.2. Then humans. Around pH 1.5. Down with the carrion eaters. Other primates sit at 3 or above. Because the scale is logarithmic, that makes the human stomach roughly thirty times more acidic than an ape's. Acid that strong is expensive. The body burns energy making it and burns more protecting its own lining from it. Evolution does not keep paying a bill like that for nothing. The study's verdict was that stomach acid is not there to digest food. It is a filter, a sterilising bath for whatever is coming down. And the strongest filter goes to the animals whose food is most closely related to themselves, because a mammal's bacteria can infect another mammal far more easily than a plant's can. Our acid was built for eating animals, the kind that had been dead a while. Your stomach is set up for a carcass, and the breakfast advice is still porridge.

A restaurant makes more on the pasta than the steak, and the entire food system worked that out before you did. The ribeye is £42 on the menu. It cost the kitchen about £14 to put on the plate. The pasta is £18. It cost about £2.50, most of which was the parmesan. The salad is £14. It cost about £2, and the lettuce was the expensive bit. The risotto is £19. It is rice, stock and a knob of butter, and the stock was free. The steak returns twice what it cost. The pasta returns six times. The salad returns six times. So the chef's special is the pasta, the salad gets a paragraph on the menu, and the steak sits at the bottom with no adjectives. Now scale the restaurant up to a country. A box of cereal is 20p of grain and £3.50 on the shelf. A plant-based burger is pea flour, rapeseed oil and a red dye, and it sells for more than the beef one it is pretending to be. An oat drink is oats and water and sells at twice the price of the milk it replaced. Every tier of the trade makes its margin on the plant, because a plant is nearly free and an animal takes two years of grass. Bill Gates owns more farmland than any other man in America, holds stakes in the fake meat firms, and told the rich world to switch to synthetic beef. The pattern in the restaurant and the pattern in the policy are the same pattern. Talk down the expensive ingredient. Sell the cheap one at the expensive price. Keep the difference. The advice you were given about meat was written by people who make eight times more when you order the pasta. Nobody is giving you a diet. They are giving you the menu with the margins folded over.

Things that take longer than a British doctor's entire nutrition training: - A driving lesson - A football match, with extra time - Boiling a Christmas ham - Waiting in A&E - Watching one series of Clarkson's Farm - Reading this list, if you're thorough Most British doctors qualify with under 2 hours of nutrition teaching across 5 years, and over 90% with under 4. The American version runs 4 years and about 20 hours, in a country that called 25 the minimum back in 1985 and never got there. Then they're handed a prescription pad and an exam-passing certainty about fat, cholesterol and the Eatwell Guide. Only 1 in 4 British doctors trust their own nutrition knowledge, and 3 in 4 rarely give any dietary advice at all. So when a doctor tells you red meat will kill you, you're not hearing medical training. You're hearing a leaflet. Every hour you spend reading is an hour more than they ever did. Start with one.

Carnivore made fasting inevitable, and I never once had to try. On carbs, 16 hours without food is a challenge with an app. On carnivore, it's Tuesday. Carbs are a fuel you burn through before the next meal. Fat is a fuel you carry on you at all times, and most people are carrying weeks of it. Years on fat have made fat burning the only engine, so when the food stops there's nothing to switch over to. A body that can burn its own fat is never hungry the way a body that can't is. It runs quietly on reserve until the next steak. That steak carries more energy and more nutrition than a whole day of sandwiches, so missing breakfast costs nothing. I eat twice a day, whenever it suits, the first around midday, and I feel the same at 9am as I do at 9pm. The people who tell me they'd faint without breakfast are telling me which fuel they run on. Three meals a day is a timetable for people whose tank empties every four hours.