Sama Hoole

University debate: "Eating meat is a learned habit, not human nature." Vegan: Nobody is born wanting a steak. We're taught it. Culture does the rest. Anthropologist: Name a culture that taught the opposite. Vegan: Plenty. India. Anthropologist: The one that ranks its vegetarians by caste and whose word for a feast involves a goat. Try again. Vegan: The Jains. Anthropologist: A religious order, a few million people, and they had to write rules to make it stick. Nature doesn't need a rulebook. Vegan: So what's natural about it? Anthropologist: There's a word for it. Meat hunger. The Hadza have one. Tribes in the Amazon have one. You can be full of yams and still have it, and every language that lives near the land invented a word for the feeling. Nobody has a word for lentil hunger. Vegan: That's language, not biology. Anthropologist: What does every culture on earth give up for a fast? Vegan: ... Anthropologist: Meat. Lent, Ramadan's daytime, the Buddhist retreat, the Hindu holy day. The sacrifice is always the animal, because a sacrifice has to cost something. No religion has ever asked its followers to give up cabbage. Vegan: That proves it's a luxury. Anthropologist: It proves it's the thing wanted. What does a chimpanzee do when one of them catches a monkey? Vegan: Shares it? Anthropologist: The whole troop gathers and begs. Chimps don't beg for figs. The want is older than us. Vegan: Children don't want meat. Anthropologist: Children don't want greens. Watch what gets bribed onto the plate and what gets taken off it. Moderator: Thirty seconds. Vegan: I was raised without it and I've never missed it. Anthropologist: You've got a word for how you feel about it, though. Everyone does.

Modern medicine will test a healthy person until it finds something it can treat for life. If your blood pressure is normal, they lower the line until it isn't. If your cholesterol is normal, they run your age through a calculator and prescribe anyway. If your sugar is normal, they lower that line too, and now you are prediabetic. If your bones are normal for your age, they measure them against a thirty-year-old's. If your kidneys are normal for your age, they call it chronic kidney disease. If your weight is normal, they redraw the chart and you wake up overweight. If your neck is normal, they scan it and find a nodule. If your vitamin D is normal, they raise the bar until most of the country is short. If your grief is normal, they give it two weeks and diagnose depression. If your child is normal but the youngest in the class, they diagnose the birthday as ADHD. If every test is normal, they sell you a scan of your whole body. If the scan is normal, they call it a baseline and book you in for next year. Each time the definition widened, somebody was already standing by with the treatment. When the cholesterol line came down, eight of the nine experts who moved it had been paid by statin makers. When osteopenia arrived, the company selling the bone drug helped get the scanners into doctors' surgeries. Nobody ever made a penny sending a healthy person home.

The idea that eating cholesterol clogs your arteries was born in 1913, in a laboratory full of rabbits fed egg yolk dissolved in sunflower oil. Nikolai Anitschkow, a young pathologist in St Petersburg, extracted cholesterol from egg yolks, dissolved it in sunflower oil, and fed it to rabbits. Their arteries filled with fatty streaks and plaques. The diet-heart idea had its founding experiment. Rabbits eat grass. A wild rabbit never swallows a milligram of cholesterol in its life, and its body was never built to deal with a dose of it. When researchers tried the same feeding on dogs, the dogs cleared it. Their arteries stayed clean until scientists suppressed their thyroids with drugs to force the result. The meat eater shrugged the cholesterol off. The grass eater choked on it. Almost nobody stopped to ask which of the two a human being resembles. A century on, the cholesterol-fed rabbit is still a standard model in heart research, and the guidelines are still written as if you were one.

In 1860 the colony of Victoria sent the best-equipped expedition in Australian history to cross the continent, and its leaders starved to death on full stomachs, among people living perfectly well on the same ground. On 20 August 1860, 15,000 people watched it leave Royal Park in Melbourne. 19 men, 26 camels, 23 horses, six wagons and 20 tonnes of kit, with food for two years, a cedar-topped oak camp table, a Chinese gong, rockets, and 60 gallons of rum for the camels on the theory that it kept off scurvy. In charge was Robert O'Hara Burke, a police superintendent who had never explored anything. They reached the north and turned back, and in April 1861 Burke, William Wills and John King staggered into their depot at Cooper Creek to find it had been abandoned that same morning. Stranded on the creek, they lived among the Yandruwandha, who brought them fish and cakes made from nardoo, a fern whose seed they ground into flour. Burke thanked them by firing his pistol over their heads, knocking fishing nets out of their hands and keeping the fish. Then the white men found a stand of nardoo for themselves and lived on it. Four or five pounds a day between them. They ate their fill and wasted. Wills's pulse fell to 48, his limbs went to skin and bone, and he wrote in his diary that starvation on nardoo was by no means unpleasant. Nardoo carries thiaminase, an enzyme that strips vitamin B1 out of the body. The Yandruwandha worked it into a wet paste before eating it, which the explorers never bothered to copy. Burke and Wills died at the end of June with bellies full of seed flour. King went to the Yandruwandha. They gave him food and shelter, he shot birds for them, and he dressed a sore on a woman called Carrawaw. When the rescue party found him in September he was living as one of them. Twenty tonnes of the best supplies in the colony, and the only man who came home was the one who let the locals feed him.

Take away one macronutrient at a time and watch what your body does. Only one of the three turns out to be optional. Go without protein. - Your body eats its own muscle for amino acids. - Then your organs, your heart included. - Your hair thins and your wounds stay open. - Your immune system stalls. - Children swell with fluid. Doctors call it kwashiorkor. The body breaks down. Go without fat. - Your skin turns dry and scaly. - Vitamins A, D, E and K go unabsorbed. - Your night vision fades and your bones soften. - Your blood stops clotting properly. - Explorers living on lean rabbit sickened within a week. The body breaks down. Go without carbohydrate. - Your liver makes all the glucose you need. - Insulin falls and your fat stores open up. - Your brain runs much of its fuel on ketones. - Your blood sugar stops lurching up and down. - The hunger that nagged every three hours goes quiet. The body adapts. Even the US Institute of Medicine admits it in writing: the lowest carbohydrate intake compatible with life is apparently zero. The first fortnight feels flat while your body retools from sugar to fat. Push through, and within a few weeks the machinery is built. Protein and fat, you cannot live without. Carbohydrate, you can, and a great many people live better for it. Give it three months. Beef, lamb, eggs, butter, cheese. No sugar, no bread, no seed oil. Then decide whether you ever needed the third one at all.

The year is 200 BC. In China, your classics teach that a barbarian is someone who does not eat grain. The Xiongnu live on meat and milk and prize strength above everything. Their boys learn to ride on sheep. They trap your emperor on a hill for seven days with 300,000 archers, and China pays them in silk and princesses for the next sixty years. The year is 9 AD. Your general thinks the Germans are men only in voice and limbs, savages to be tamed with Roman law. Caesar wrote that milk, cheese and meat make them enormous. Within four days 15,000 of you are dead, and your skulls are nailed to the trees. The year is 60 AD. Rome files the Britons as savages who sow no grain and live on milk and meat, yet British boys in Rome stand half a foot taller than the tallest Romans. You live in Londinium when Boudica arrives, a woman taller than any of you, and 70,000 die in three burning towns. The year is 449. Your historians call the Huns two-legged beasts, all thick necks and hard limbs, who warm half-raw meat under their thighs as they ride. Your emperor pays them 2,100 pounds of gold a year. At Attila's feast you eat off silver. He eats nothing but meat, off a wooden plate. The year is 1012. Your Church condemns the Danes as heathens who eat horse. Raised on beef and soured milk and led by Thorkell the Tall, they winter on your cattle and take 48,000 pounds of your silver. When the Archbishop of Canterbury refuses to be ransomed, they pelt him with ox bones and split his skull with an axe. The year is 1241. Your chroniclers call the Mongols monsters who drink blood and tear raw flesh. Raised on meat and mare's milk, they ride from the age of three. They destroy the army of Hungary in a single morning, and in 1258 the Tigris runs black with the ink of Baghdad's libraries. The year is 2026. You are taught that red meat causes cancer, that raw milk is a danger to the public, and that anyone living on steak and butter is a caveman. For two thousand years the civilised have been taught to sneer at the people raised on meat and milk, and for two thousand years those people have stood taller and lived freer than the ones sneering. Which side would you rather be on?

Colleague: "You must be missing something. There's stuff in plants you can't get from meat." Me: "Name one." Colleague: "Vitamin C." Me: "Fresh meat's got it. Raw milk's got it. Nansen sat in a hole in the Arctic for nine months on bear and never lost a tooth." Colleague: "Fibre." Me: "Fibre's the bit you can't digest. You're listing the wrapper." Colleague: "Antioxidants, then." Me: "The main one's made in your own liver, out of the amino acids in last night's mutton. Nobody's ever been admitted to hospital short of blueberries." Colleague: "Folate. That's in greens, it's named after them." Me: "It's in egg yolk and cheese as well, and I had four of one and a slab of the other for breakfast. Named after a leaf, found in a hen." Colleague: "Vitamin K." Me: "The one your bones use is K2. Goat butter, cheese, yolk. The kale version mostly stays in the kale." Colleague: "Beta-carotene." Me: "Which you've got to convert into vitamin A, and a lot of people barely can. The yolk's already done it." Colleague: "You're just saying egg for everything." Me: "You're just saying leaf for everything. Mine works." Colleague: "There has to be something only a plant makes." Me: "There is. A chemical to stop you eating it. Every plant on earth makes one. The cow's the only one of us built to deal with them, which is why I let her go first." Colleague: "So what's actually in your lunch?" Me: "Mutton mince, butter, and all of the above. What's in yours?" Colleague: "A wrap." Me: "Then one of us is missing something."

Every British kitchen in 1975 had picked a side, and you can still tell which one raised you by what your hand does at the toaster. The butter house. A dish on the table with a lid that never quite fitted, left out from breakfast so it would spread by tea. The basin of dripping in the pantry, white on top, the brown jelly underneath that your dad put on bread with salt when he thought nobody was looking. A Sunday joint that announced itself to the whole street by half eleven. Toast eaten standing up, the butter going through to the plate. Full cream milk on the step with the cream in the neck, and a bird that had learnt how to get at it. The tub house. Stork first, then Flora the moment the doctor mentioned your dad's heart. A yellow tub in the fridge door with a lid you peeled, and a rectangle of something that spread straight from cold and tasted of the fridge. Skimmed milk, grey in the tea, as soon as the Co-op stocked it. Grill marks on everything. The roast carved thin and the fat trimmed off onto the side of the plate like a mistake. A mum reading the back of packets under the kitchen light, doing her best with what the leaflet said. The two houses married each other. One side brought the dish, the other brought the tub, and for a decade the fridge held both while the argument ran quietly over the toast. The tub house was doing what it was told. The advice came with a white coat on, in 1984 it came with the government's stamp, and a man who had watched his own father go at 52 was never going to argue with it. He gave up the butter, the dripping, the yolks, the top of the milk. He gave up the smell of the kitchen. He took the margarine tub to the grave with him anyway, mostly on schedule, and the advice shrugged and moved on to the next thing. The butter house ate the same as its grandparents and got called old fashioned for it. Fifty years on, the dish is back on the table in the houses that can afford to be fashionable. It never left the ones that couldn't be bothered.

Most people pass the beef in the supermarket and see a decent bit of protein with a guilty conscience attached. Something that mooed, took up space, and now has to be offset. I see the most advanced piece of technology in the building. Somewhere on a hill no plough has ever touched, a bullock walked out one morning and ate grass. Cellulose. You could eat a field of it and starve. Two million years of being the cleverest primate on the planet and we still cannot get a calorie out of a lawn. He can. He carries a four-chambered fermentation plant about with him, forty gallons of warm broth seething with microbes no laboratory has managed to copy, and he turned a hedge into this. Every amino acid your body needs, in the proportions it needs them. Iron in the one form your gut will actually take. Zinc. B12, which no plant on earth makes. Creatine, carnitine, taurine. Fat with the vitamins already dissolved in it. All of it done standing in the rain, on land where nothing else edible will grow. No diesel, no nitrogen plant, no steel tanks. He maintains himself, repairs himself, breeds himself, and his exhaust goes back into the grass. Everyone who has tried to make meat without him has needed a bioreactor, a patent, a billion in venture money and a press officer. Then somebody stops at the chiller and sees a tragedy, and swaps it for a block of pea paste that took twenty ingredients and a marketing team to taste a bit like him. Rain and sunlight in. The most complete food a human can eat out. Ten thousand years, unpatented, still running. The only thing that ever beat it was the story, and the people who wrote the story were selling the substitute.

In 1982 Argentina put 10,000 men on islands carrying 600,000 sheep, and let them starve. The conscripts were 18 and 19, boys from the warm north of the country, flown onto the Falklands in April with summer kit for a winter at 51 degrees south. The supply system was a shambles. Food sat in Stanley while the men in the hills got a tin between two and sometimes nothing for days. They dug holes in the peat and the holes filled with water. Trench foot. Dysentery. Weights falling by the week. All around them was the oldest larder in the South Atlantic. The Falklands run on sheep. There is one for every two people in Argentina, and they were standing in the field next to the trench. The boys were not allowed to touch them. A conscript caught killing a sheep, or stealing a biscuit from the stores, was staked out: hands and feet tied, laid face down on the wet ground in the wind for hours. Veterans have described men tortured because we were starving and tried to grab some cookies or to butcher a sheep. Others were put in holes in the freezing peat as punishment. Officers ate. Then the British landed, and the men who had come 8,000 miles by sea did what any soldier in a sheep country does. They shot mutton and roasted it. Falklanders drove meat out to the positions. The paras went up Longdon and Tumbledown fed. Argentina's own army inquiry afterwards blamed the failures of food on the collapse of its men, and the staking of conscripts went to trial as a crime against humanity. An army sitting in a field of meat was ordered not to eat it, and the one that came from the other side of the world ate its way across the islands.

Let kids be kids is the sentence that lets a parent off the hook at the exact moment the child cannot afford it. A friend said it to me last week, handing a four-year-old a pouch of something purple at half past three because he was whining. The whining stopped. The pouch went in the bin. Everyone relaxed. That is the deal, and it is a good one for the adult. The child is the one paying. Between birth and twenty, a body builds everything it will ever have. The brain triples in size in three years and is mostly fat. Nine tenths of the bone a person will own is laid down before they are twenty, and the window does not reopen. Every brick comes off a plate, and a four-year-old does not fill his own plate. He also does not choose what he gets used to. That is done for him, before he can read. A child who grows up on pouches, squash and cereal bars learns that food is sweet, soft, instant and arrives when he makes a noise. His tongue is calibrated to it. His afternoon is built around it. By seven it is a habit. By seventeen it is a craving. By thirty it has a prescription. Nobody kicks a food habit at thirty that was laid down at four. Ask anyone who has tried. You would never say let kids be kids about the seatbelt, the sun cream, the swimming lessons or the reading. Only about the one thing with a deadline the body never extends. Letting them be kids is giving them the egg, the butter, the mince, the milk and the lamb chop while the bones and the brain are still being poured, and letting the sugar wait at the door until the tongue is grown up enough to ignore it. The pouch at half past three was never for him. It was for you. He is the one who gets to keep it.

Every time they redrew the line for "healthy", millions became patients overnight. 1997 · Diabetes Line moved: blood sugar 140 → 126 Patients: 8 million → 10 million Result: cases nearly doubled by 2009 1998 · Overweight Line moved: overweight BMI 27.8 → 25 Patients: 68 million → 97 million Result: obesity up nearly 40% by 2018 2003 · Prediabetes Line moved: normal sugar 110 → 100 Patients: 1 in 5 adults → 1 in 3 Result: diabetes kept on climbing 2014 · Statins, UK Line moved: heart risk 20% → 10% Patients: 12.5 million → 17 million Result: early heart deaths rising again 2017 · Blood pressure Line moved: high BP 140/90 → 130/80 Patients: 1 in 3 adults → nearly half Result: fewer had it under control Every revision found more patients. Not one of them found less disease.

Wales has a colony in Patagonia because a people who sailed there to grow wheat were kept alive by hunters who brought them meat. In 1865, 153 Welsh men, women and children left Liverpool on a converted tea clipper called the Mimosa. They had been promised a new Wales across the Atlantic, beyond the reach of English landlords and the English language, and the men who scouted it had come home describing green country by a river. They were going to plough it and sow wheat. They landed on 28 July. It was winter. In front of them was gravel, dry scrub and a wind off the steppe that did not stop. There was almost no fresh water near the bay, and the river they had been promised was a long walk south. Some of the first arrivals sheltered in caves dug into the cliffs. They reached the river valley and planted. The first harvests failed. They were people from chapel valleys who knew how to farm Welsh weather, set down where it barely rained. Within months they were rationing, and then they were starving. Then the Tehuelche came. The Tehuelche were the hunters of that steppe. They lived on guanaco, the wild cousin of the llama, and on rhea, the big flightless bird of the plains, run down on horseback and brought down with bolas, stones on cords whirled and thrown at the legs. They had no reason to help a camp of strangers in black coats, and they helped anyway. They traded. Meat and hides for whatever the Welsh could spare, and the Welsh could spare a little bread. They taught the young men to ride after guanaco and throw the bolas. The colony began to eat. The Tehuelche liked Welsh bread so much they took the Welsh word for it home. They came to farmhouse doors asking for bara, and the word passed into the talk of the steppe. In 1867 a woman called Rachel Jenkins watched the river rise and suggested its water could be led out across the dry ground. Her husband Aaron dug the first channel. Irrigation came. The wheat came after it, eventually, and the colony stuck. Gaiman, in Chubut, still serves Welsh tea and bara brith to tourists, and Welsh is still spoken there. The guidebooks tell it as a story of irrigation and chapels and stubbornness, and it was. It was also a story of the years when the wheat failed, and the only food in that desert was running about on four legs and two, and the people who knew how to catch it decided to share.

Customer: "Do you do bones? I've been told to make broth for the collagen." Butcher: "Who told you?" Customer: "The woman in the health shop. She's just sold me a tub of the powder as well. Twenty-eight quid." Butcher: "What's it say on the tub?" Customer: "Bovine collagen. Hydrolysed." Butcher: "What's bovine?" Customer: "...Cow." Butcher: "Which bit of the cow?" Customer: "It doesn't say." Butcher: "The hide. They take the skin off him, boil it down, dry it to a powder and sell it back to you by the gram. That's the whole industry. It's him, in a tub, at about forty times what I'd get for the skin." Customer: "So it does work?" Butcher: "It's gelatine. Same as a trifle. Your grandmother got it off the Sunday joint and called it gravy that set." Customer: "What should I buy, then?" Butcher: "Shin. Oxtail. A trotter if you're brave. The bits with the gristle in, that's the collagen you've just paid £28 for. Three hours, lid on, and the pan sets solid in the fridge overnight." Customer: "Solid?" Butcher: "Like a jelly. That's the test. If the broth doesn't set, there was no collagen in it. The pouches in the supermarket don't set. Half of them have gelatine added so they look like they did." Customer: "And the tub?" Butcher: "The tub's a trotter that went to university. Keep it if you like. I'll do you a kilo of shin for a fiver and you can have the bones for nothing, same as my dad gave them to the dog."

In 1983 five trained cyclists cut their carbohydrate to almost nothing, and four weeks later they rode just as long as they had on a high-carb diet. The secret was the four weeks. Carb-loading had come out of Swedish labs in the 1960s. Muscle glycogen runs out, the athlete hits the wall, so fill the muscles with carbohydrate before you start. Researchers had tested the alternative by switching athletes onto fat for a few days. They faded badly, and the verdict stuck. Fat was a poor fuel for exercise. Stephen Phinney thought a few days proved nothing. A body fed on sugar is built to burn sugar, and the machinery for burning fat at pace takes weeks to build. So at MIT he took five well-trained cyclists. For one week they ate a standard athlete's diet, more than half their calories from carbohydrate. Then they rode at a steady pace, about 63% of their maximum, until they could no longer turn the pedals. Average time to exhaustion, 147 minutes. Then the carbohydrate went. Under 20 grams a day, about a slice and a half of bread. Same calories, same protein, the rest from fat. Not for a few days. For four weeks. Then they rode again at the same intensity. Average time to exhaustion, 151 minutes. Their maximum aerobic capacity had not changed. The engine had. Before, just over half their fuel on the bike came from fat. After four weeks it was almost all of it. They were burning sugar at a third of the old rate, and muscle glycogen at less than a quarter. Not one of them showed a blood sugar crash, on a diet with almost no carbohydrate in it. That is fat adaptation. The first days without carbs feel flat because the body is still set up for sugar. Quit there, and you walk away certain you need the carbs. Stay, and the body rebuilds itself to run on fat. Forty years on, the sports nutrition aisle is wall-to-wall gels, chews, bars and drinks, all sold on the idea that the body stalls without a top-up. Even a lean cyclist carries tens of thousands of calories of stored fat and only around two thousand of stored carbohydrate. The industry sells refills for the small tank. Phinney showed the body can learn to run on the big one.

The Denisovans were supposed to be a dead end on the human family tree, and it turns out they stood up to 6 foot 3, hunted woolly rhino on the roof of the world, and are still alive inside millions of people today. You know the old poster. A stooped ape on the left, a man on the right, one straight line between them, and everything that wasn't us filed away as a failed draft. Cavemen. Brutes. Extinct, and therefore irrelevant. The Denisovans were not even on the poster. Until 2010 nobody knew they had existed. Then a finger bone in a Siberian cave gave up a genome that matched no human ever recorded. For fifteen years that was all there was. A finger, a few teeth, and a ghost. Then a skull, dug up beside a bridge in Harbin in 1933 and hidden down a well for 85 years, was confirmed as Denisovan. One of the largest human skulls ever found, holding a brain as big as yours. Then, this August, two leg bones dredged up by fishermen off Taiwan. One man about 5 foot 11 and 83 kilos. The other about 6 foot 3 and 91, taller than most men alive today, more than 30,000 years before the first farm. A ghost turned into a giant in a single summer. On the Tibetan plateau, 3,280 metres up, their cave was full of what built those bodies. Blue sheep. Wild yak. Wild horses. Woolly rhinoceros. Even spotted hyena. Meat cut off the bone, the bones cracked for the marrow, the leftovers made into tools. They lived up there for 160,000 years, on ground where nothing grows that could feed a frame like that. The chemistry in the Taiwan shin bone tells the same story. A big share of that man's diet came from animals. Our ancestors met them, and had children with them. Their DNA runs through Asia and the Pacific today. Some people in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines carry around 5%. In Europeans there is almost none. So much for the idea that Asians were built for rice and Europeans for steak. The meat-eating giants of the Ice Age were Asian. They hunted from Siberia to Taiwan for hundreds of thousands of years, and their blood is in Asian families now. Rice was first farmed about 9,000 years ago. Most Tibetans, and the Sherpas, carry a Denisovan version of a gene that helps the blood cope with thin air. It is part of why they can live and work where the rest of us gasp. Call them a failed draft if you like. Millions of people are breathing through them. The biggest, strongest humans of the Ice Age built their bodies on animals at the top of the world, and handed their lungs down to the people who still herd yak there. Somewhere on Everest this morning, a Sherpa is carrying a tourist's oat milk up the mountain on lungs he inherited from a giant who hunted woolly rhino.

In Colorado, researchers gave breastfed babies puréed beef as their very first solid food instead of the iron-fortified cereal on every weaning chart, and the beef babies grew bigger heads. Nancy Krebs took 88 babies, breastfed and four months old, and split them at random. From five months, half were spoon-fed puréed beef. Half got the iron-fortified baby cereal American paediatricians had handed out as first food for generations. The babies took to the beef just as happily as the cereal. Between seven and twelve months, the heads of the beef babies grew faster. The amount of zinc and protein a baby took in predicted how much its head grew. Her team kept going. Breastfed babies given more protein from meat grew longer, without putting on extra fat. Then they took formula-fed babies and gave half of them meat purée and half of them yoghurt, cheese and whey from five months to a year. The meat babies climbed up the growth charts for length. The dairy babies slipped down them, and got heavier for their height instead. At two years old, the difference was still there. The World Health Organization now says babies should have meat, fish or eggs every day from six months if they can. The jar on the supermarket shelf still says baby rice.

The Ice Age mammoth hunters of Europe stood close to six feet, and it took their descendants until the 21st century to grow back to it. The Gravettians hunted mammoth, reindeer and horse across Europe from around 33,000 years ago. Their men averaged about 176 centimetres in Central Europe, and nearer 183 in the Mediterranean. The researchers who measured every skeleton they could find put it down, first and foremost, to high nutritional standards. Then the ice advanced, the herds thinned, and the hunters shrank. Then the farms arrived. By the late Neolithic, farming men in the Carpathian Basin averaged 162 centimetres. About 5 foot 4. Fourteen centimetres, gone, in the heart of the same continent. Height crawled back with the herders and the dairy of the Bronze Age, slumped again in the industrial slums, and some European populations only matched the mammoth hunters around the year 2000. The tallest men alive today, in the mountains of Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro, still carry a male lineage traced back to those same hunters. It took 30,000 years, refrigeration and a pint on every doorstep to get back to where a man with a spear started.

What people picture when they hear carnivore, and what it actually looks like. What they picture: - A red-faced man eating two kilos of steak at a table for one - Gout by Christmas - Scurvy by Easter - A heart attack in the car park - Constipated and proud of it - A bodybuilder with a forum login - A fridge full of raw liver - Nothing green for the rest of his life, out of spite What it is: - A woman of fifty-four eating mince, eggs and butter, and sleeping through for the first time in a decade - A pensioner whose knees stopped hurting and who no longer carries antacids - A farmer eating what he grows, as his grandfather did - A nurse who stopped being hungry at three o'clock on a twelve-hour shift - A teenager whose skin cleared in a month and who does not know why - A man who threw out four of his tablets with his doctor's shrug - A bill at the butcher's and nothing at the pharmacy The picture was drawn by people who never met one. The reality is standing behind them in the queue for mince.

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.