Unexplored Potential

Nine people in ten would point at the steak on the right and call it the healthy one, and I have run out of patience with every single one of them. The one on the right is a ribeye with the ribeye taken out. The one on the left is the animal as it was built, a cap of fat round the edge thick enough to earn the word, a seam of it between the muscles, marbling through the eye so dense it looks like frost. Fifty years ago the butcher would have charged you more for the one on the left and apologised for the one on the right. Now the trimmed one is premium and the real one is a guilty pleasure, and the country that fell for that is the country with the diabetes clinic. The fat is the food. A, D, E and K2 live in it and nowhere else on the plate. The flavour lives in it, which is why the right one needs a jus and the left one needs a knife. The fullness lives in it, which is why the right one has you at the fridge by nine and the left one has you forgetting breakfast. The fuel lives in it. The red is the packaging, and you have been taught to buy the packaging and tip the contents away. And this fat, out of every fat on the counter, is the one that cannot hurt you. The cow's rumen saturated it before it reached her. It sits solid and white on the board, it does not go rancid in the pan the way the bottle of sunflower oil does, and it is the fat your great-grandmother fried everything in while heart disease was still a rarity you wrote up in a journal. So who convinced you otherwise. A margarine firm with a heart on the lid, a 1977 guideline written by a man who never ran a trial, and forty years of magazine covers, every one of them paid by somebody with a bottle to sell. They could not sell you the fat on the left, because it comes free with the cow. So they taught you to fear it and sold you the substitute. Half a century on, the lean one costs more, tastes of less, leaves you hungry, and gets called healthy by people who have never once asked what the fat was for. The one on the left. Eat the edge first. Stop apologising for being right.

A vitamin D capsule gives you vitamin D. An egg yolk gives you vitamin D, plus the choline, plus the fat that carries it in, plus a dozen compounds nobody has bothered to name. A calcium tablet gives you calcium. A wedge of hard cheese gives you calcium, plus the vitamin K2 that sends the calcium into your bones instead of your arteries. A fish oil capsule gives you omega-3, often oxidised before the lid came off. A fillet of mackerel gives you the same omega-3, fresh, plus the vitamin D, plus the selenium, plus the protein it arrived wrapped in. An iron tablet gives you iron and a fortnight of stomach ache. A slice of beef gives you iron your body actually absorbs, plus the B12 no plant can hand you, plus the zinc, plus the protein to put it all to work. The tablet carries the headline nutrient. The food carries the nutrient and the instructions for using it. Pull one compound out of the 20 it evolved alongside and you get the compound, not the result. That is why the big trials on single supplements keep coming back flat, year after year, to everyone's surprise but the cow's. You can buy the ingredient in a capsule. You cannot buy the recipe.