Meritocracy Party of Canada

Sunlight on skin makes vitamin D out of cholesterol. Sunlight on skin releases nitric oxide and drops your blood pressure. Sunlight at dawn sets the clock running your sleep and your mood. Sunlight in a child's eye slows the elongation that becomes short-sightedness. Every living thing on this planet is downstream of that star, without exception. It has arrived free every morning for four billion years. The eye was built specifically to receive it. And somewhere in the last forty years we were taught to be afraid of it. Afraid of the sun. We check an index before we go outside. We coat children in chemicals before school, every two hours. When the regulator finally tested those chemicals, all six crossed into the blood after one application. The star that made every calorie you have ever eaten is now something you buy a product to avoid. Vitamin D deficiency went from a slum disease to a routine blood result. No animal has ever needed protecting from its own star. Every other creature on earth still moves toward it. One species checks an app first.

A wolf has a stomach at pH 1, a short simple gut, and no fermentation chamber anywhere in it. It eats meat. A lion has an intestine about four times its body length, where a grazer runs twenty, and it sleeps twenty hours a day between kills. It eats meat. A cat cannot make its own taurine and cannot turn carotene into vitamin A. Denied animal tissue it goes blind and its heart gives out. It eats meat. A crocodile secretes the strongest stomach acid ever measured in a vertebrate, strong enough to take bone and horn apart. It eats meat. A ferret moves food from mouth to exit in about three hours. There is no time in that gut to ferment anything. It eats meat. An eagle has forward-facing eyes, a hooked beak, talons, and coughs up the parts it cannot dissolve. It eats meat. A polar bear stores so much vitamin A in its liver that one meal of it will poison a man. It eats meat. Not one of them was ever told. The body was the instruction. Now the human. Stomach acid at pH 1.5, as acidic as animals that eat things they find already dead. Small intestine running two thirds of the gut, colon under a quarter. That is the carnivore's proportion, upside down from every leaf-eater alive. No cellulase. No rumen. A caecum so useless we take it out when it complains. B12 in no plant on earth. Haem iron absorbed at twenty-five to thirty-five percent against two to ten for the plant version. Forward-facing eyes. A shoulder built to throw. Skin that sweats, so we can run something faster than us into the ground by mid-afternoon. Our tapeworms split from the ones in lions and hyenas 1.7 million years ago, because we were standing at the same carcass. Stone tools were stripping meat off bone 2.6 million years back. Same acid. Same gut. Same eyes. The only animal on earth that can read its own biology is the only one arguing with it.