Meat me half-way...

If there’s one thing more controversial in the conspiraverse than even the Paul is Dead debate (or calling an article ‘Jew diligence‘...), it’s this:

Diet.

If you want to fall out with everyone forever, simply posit this simple question:

What’s a healthy human diet?

It’s paleo!

No, it’s keto!

No, it’s carnivore!

Or, if you veer in the other direction, it’s veganism, fruitarianism, or even - oh yes - breatharianism.

Well, you are all wrong.

(I did tell you about the “falling out with everyone” thing...)

I have only fairly recently come to that conclusion, after a lifetime of being saturated in the politics of eating (food being far more political than it is nutritional, which we will get to shortly), and so I thought I would share my conclusions, in case they are of interest to anyone* (*so they can provoke emphatic outrage on Twitter).

When I was born, I was a vegan. Not by choice, you understand, but I was born into a liberal family in the 1980s, surrounded by university academics and Buddhists, and so veganism was rather in vogue. My mother was a vegan, and so was my friend’s mother, next door. There was a lot of tofu and Tartex.

I had soya milk on my cereal, tahini on toast, and, for a treat, colourful packs of sesame snaps.

I was not happy with this arrangement.

One day, when I was about four, we attended a family wedding, and I was told I was allowed to have anything I wanted from the buffet. I made an immediate beeline for the ham sandwiches.

“You don’t want those,” my mother cautioned. “They’re made out of dead pig.”

I looked up at her, a mix of indignation and fury on my little face, and declared at the top of my voice:

“But I WANT dead pig!”

Demonstrating an early - if somewhat inarticulate - understanding of the realities of food production, I indicated I was happy to eat meat, even though I knew it came from animals, and I liked animals. I didn’t find these positions to be contradictory.

Nevertheless, as my mother didn’t want to keep meat in the house, I continued to eat a largely vegan diet as I grew up, eating a lot of bread, pasta, and potatoes.

Once I became secondary-school aged, I never ate breakfast, not only because I had no appetite in the mornings, but also, because I often felt slightly sick first thing. It didn’t alarm me - it was mild, wore off quickly, and I assumed it was normal. I didn’t know any different.

I’d walk to school and start lessons, and wouldn’t start to feel hunger pangs until around midday. For lunch, I had the same thing every day: a plate of chips and a white bread roll. The school did nominally offer ‘meat’ options, but the charred, grizzled burger patties, or, worse, the ‘healthy’ wizened, soggy tuna fish rolls didn’t tempt even the most hardened carnivore.

So, every day, without fail, me and my friends all got the same thing: chips. Sometimes, for a treat, we’d have a slice of the thick, doorstep ‘pizza’ to go with them, an offering comprised almost entirely of dough, with a thin sliver of cheese and tomato on top.

Then, as was our ritual, we’d visit “the vender” - the school vending machine - to get a Kit Kat or a Toffee Crisp.

For dinner, the typical fare at my house was something like pasta and vegetable sauce, or vegan fish fingers (yes, they’re a thing...) with mash. For snacks, cereal or toast.

Whilst I wasn’t overweight, I began to notice that, while my stomach was flat first thing in the morning, it was swollen and hard by the end of the day. I’d at first thought that was normal - after all, there was food in it at the end of the day, when there wasn’t first thing - but gradually, it began to dawn on me that this issue didn’t afflict my friends, and their stomachs stayed flat, no matter what they ate.

By the time I was 18, my digestive situation had worsened, and I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). I was advised to change my diet, but the initial advice I’d been given - eat more fibre and less fat - made it worse. I subsisted on jacket potatoes with baked beans (no butter), seed-sprinkled salads with skinless chicken breast, and huge mounds of boiled vegetables.

This regime left me with a stomach so swollen and uncomfortable that, at times, I couldn’t leave the house.

I was thoroughly miserable (there’s also a strong link between IBS and depression) and began researching other options, eventually coming across low-carb and Atkins, which had become very fashionable at the time (the pub chain Yates’s even did a special Atkins meal, which was two chicken breasts and a steak). Low-carb diets, I learned, could successfully treat IBS.

So, I swapped potatoes and salads for meat and fish, and ta-da - it worked!

My digestive problems completely resolved, and I also stopped feeling sick in the mornings.

For a while...

I followed a low-carb regime very strictly for two years, where my diet consisted exclusively of beef, chicken, salmon, and a small amount of low-starch vegetables. I rarely drank alcohol, but if I did, it was vodka with a diet mixer. I consumed no starch at all, and also no fruit, honey, or sugar of any sort.

My digestion was great.

But otherwise, I wasn’t feeling so good...

I’d started having what I could only describe as “attacks”, where I would suddenly feel intensely sick, go very pale, and feel for all the world like (despite the fact there was none in my diet) I’d just consumed a bag of sugar.

The first time this ever happened, I was two years into my diet, and had gone to stay with a friend, who had cooked for us jacket potatoes with hummus. Not wanting to offend, I decided to eat the potato - I’d been on the IBS-alleviating diet for so long now, surely my guts had healed and a single potato couldn’t do any harm?

I ate the potato, and soon after, retired to bed.

I jolted awake around 4am, feeling utterly awful: like I had the world’s worst hangover, even though I hadn’t consumed any alcohol. I felt sick to my stomach, my heart was pounding, and when I looked in the mirror, I could see I had gone as white as a sheet.

I’d read quite a lot about nutrition by that point, and knew what had happened was that my blood sugar had gone sky high from the jacket potato - and that I needed to get it down ASAP.

I located some vodka and Diet Coke, and then - feeling slightly like an inveterate alcoholic given it was 4am and I’d just got up - immediately made myself a large measure and consumed it, knowing that strong alcohol crashes blood sugar (hence why diabetics have to be careful with it). After a while, I started to feel okay again, but it took several hours to completely go back to normal, and I was thoroughly spooked.

That’s it, I thought firmly. That’s proof of how evil carbs are, just like all the low-carb gurus say. No more carbs for me.

And therein lies the trap that millions of us have fallen into...

Initially, when I first developed these symptoms, I became convinced I was diabetic: despite the fact I was in my twenties, slim, active, and had no family history of the condition.

I went to the doctors no less than three times to be tested for it.

“You’re not diabetic,” the doctors told me firmly, every time.

“Why do I feel so awful then?” I demanded.

The doctors shrugged, and scribbled something about hypochondria in my notes.

So, I did what every modern person would naturally do in such circumstances: I took to the internet.

I visited a well-regarded diabetes forum, and described my symptoms.

A straight-talking American took me to task.

“Look, lady,” he said. “I’m diabetic. When I was diagnosed, my sugars were sky high. I was textbook for a stroke or a heart attack. I’m old, I’m fat, and I ate crap. But my symptoms were pretty vague. I just felt more tired than usual, and peed a lot. Nothing like what you’re talking about. Whatever’s going on with you, it’s not diabetes.”

Stupid, rude American, I thought, darkly.

But, reluctantly, I acknowledged there was something in what he was saying.

I didn’t have the typical symptoms of diabetes.

I wasn’t tired a lot, I wasn’t experiencing increased hunger or thirst, and I definitely wasn’t visiting the lavatory more than usual.

In fact, I had a rather legendary reputation for being able to consume large quantities of liquids without ever needing the loo (”camel-like”, I was called, which I think was a compliment).

So I wasn’t diabetic.

But, I eventually realised, I was its close cousin and precursor:

Insulin resistant.

I was insulin resistant when I started low-carbing - that’s why I’d always felt felt sick in the mornings, and it was a major contributor to my digestive problems, insulin resistance being a strong predictor of IBS.

So, a low-carb diet had made me feel better at first, by removing the main insulin-producing trigger, carbs.

The problem is that it hadn’t actually resolved my insulin resistance, in the same way that removing peanuts from the diet doesn’t resolve a peanut allergy, or going gluten-free doesn’t ‘cure’ coeliac.

It just alleviates symptoms.

Of course, that’s all you can do with allergy-based conditions, there is typically no ‘cure’, so all you can do is symptom-swerve by not consuming the allergen.

But insulin resistance can be cured... and long-term low-carb isn’t the way to do it.

Not only does sticking to a low-carb diet over the long-term not resolve existing resistance, but it can, and often does, make it worse. That’s why I felt so much worse eating carbohydrates after doing low-carb for two years, than I did before.

Hence, the “carbs are evil” mantra that exists amongst many long-term low-carbers, which they understandably develop, because they’ve come to feel so awful if they ever eat them.

But that awful feeling (and here’s where everyone really falls out with me) is not proof carbs are evil: it’s proof that your diet made you severely intolerant to them. And that’s not healthy.

It’s well documented in nature that ketosis (the prized metabolic state amongst low-carbers) can produce insulin resistance, with one notable example being bears. Bears enter a mild ketosis in their long hibernation periods, which can last for up to eight months, where they live entirely off their body fat.

When they awake, they are severely insulin resistant, to the point of being in the diabetic range.

How do they reverse this?

Researchers have found it’s the re-feeding of sugar (particularly glucose) that is key in “waking up” the bear’s cells and reversing the insulin resistance. If they remained in ketosis, they would remain insulin resistant.

The truth is (and this shouldn’t be at all controversial to state, yet, oh my, how it is...) - we are omnivores, just like bears are. As such, we, like bears, should be able to easily handle both natural fats from animals and natural sugars from plants. We need both.

We are certainly not (as some vegans insist) herbivores or frugivores - but nor are we (as the extreme low-carbers declare) carnivores.

We have an intestinal environment very similar to a carnivore, because we are meant to eat meat.

We have teeth very similar to a herbivore, because we are meant to eat non-meat, too (mostly fruit, given that much plant matter is riddled with defensive chemistry to stop mammals from eating it, and therefore is, to various degrees, poisonous to us).

If you reject this reality and instead go to extremes (veganism, carnivore), then ultimately, you’re going to have problems.

The arguments against veganism are well rehearsed, and I doubt I need to go into them in any detail for the readers of this site (but a great primer is The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, a militant vegan for 20 years, who subsequently rejected the ideology and exposed its many nutritional myths and environmental lies).

But the arguments against carnivore / keto are less widely discussed, because it is relentlessly repeated that “we don’t need carbs because the body makes all the sugar it needs itself through gluconeogenesis”.

Yet to declare that because the body makes it, we don’t need to consume it, is kind of like saying, “women don’t need to consume any calcium in pregnancy, because the baby can take what it needs from her bones”.

Yes, technically that’s true - but there’s a rather big cost involved.

Namely, if, over many months and years, you don’t eat the sugar your body needs, but force it to produce it itself instead, you will very likely develop, or exacerbate existing, insulin resistance, and you may well develop other undesirable health problems too, such as hypothyroidism (the thyroid loves carbs), and hair loss (there’s a reason so many of the carnivore bros are bald).

This is because hair follicles are some of the most metabolically active tissues in the body, requiring a high and steady supply of energy - primarily glucose - to drive rapid cell division during the growth phase.

So, when there’s a scarcity in supply, the body will redirect what glucose is available towards essential, keeping-you-alive functionality, and sacrifice “non-essentials” like hair.

Sure, not everyone who does keto experiences hair loss, in the same way that not everyone who smokes develops lung cancer, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a known consequence of the regime for some.

None of this is meant to imply that I’m stridently anti-keto or carnivore, because I’m not. As sort of “reboots” or short-term solutions, they have a wealth of benefits, and if you’re eating the standard Western diet, or if you’ve been strict vegetarian or vegan for a long time, these diets are a big improvement.

Keto-style diets can produce dramatic health improvements very quickly, by removing many ‘trigger’ and inflammatory foods, as well as causing sustained weight loss for people who have struggled to lose it on any other diet.

So the problem isn’t the diets per se: it’s the longevity. It’s when people stick rigidly to these regimes long-term - more than around 9 months seems to be where the problems kick in (which is in keeping with our bear friends).

“But how can ketosis cause problems? It’s natural!”

Ketosis is a natural state, yes. But it’s also an emergency one - a backup adaptation for when the body’s preferred fuel, glucose, isn’t available.

So if the “emergency state” persists for longer than the body is designed to withstand the “emergency”, then problems start - given that, typically in human history, glucose sources would became available again fairly quickly, once fruit and roots grew back, plus humans have had access to milk sugars from dairy for about 10,000 years, as well as sugar from honey.

So while it’s true our ancestors certainly experienced ketosis - possibly quite frequently, depending on where in the world they lived - the crucial difference is that they didn’t maintain it for years on end with no break, as modern keto and carnivore adherents advise. They cycled in and out of it, and avoided it if they could.

We as modern humans are adapted to move in and out of ketosis over our lifetimes, in concert with what food is available, just as our ancestors did. We’re not, however, meant to maintain it permanently.

“But the Eskimos!”

They’re often pointed to in keto circles as the perfect puritanical people, who eat no carbohydrates at all, are thus constantly in ketosis, and thrive.

In reality, Arctic dwellers intentionally seek out glucose. They obtain calories from carbohydrates mostly in the form of glycogen, otherwise called “animal starch,” from the consumption of raw meat. They also practice a unique process of fermenting animal protein into carbohydrates.

In the same way critics of veganism are absolutely right to point out there has never been a “vegan civilisation” in history (and the only successful vegetarian ones consume copious amounts of dairy) there has never been a “ketogenic civilisation”, either.

There are no civilisations that ever lived solely on ketogenic diets, including Arctic and ancient ones, and humans have always sought out glucose, just as they have always sought out meat.

That’s because we need both.

It seems such a simple and obvious truth, but the realm of food and diet has become so deeply convoluted and dangerously politicised, it can take many of us several decades to actually arrive at this conclusion (if we do at all).

It’s good to see the vegan star waning (every time I go to the reduced section as Tesco’s, it’s always full of various “meatless meals”), but the fact that “plant-based diets” have been so vigorously foisted on us for such a long time, causing a host of problems in their wake, is now causing a swing to another unhelpful extreme.

I follow a very interesting influencer on Twitter, named Sama Hoole. Mr Hoole is a committed carnivore (he’s so devout, he won’t even eat salt, as it doesn’t come from an animal), and writes lots of long, articulate, and insightful posts about the history of diet, and how heavily it’s always been influenced by politics.

He explains how the nobility have always eaten diets rich in meat and animal products, whilst passing various laws and edicts, some of them brutal, to restrict the meat consumption of the lower classes.

In 12th century England, for example, the penalty for a peasant killing a deer for food was blindness and castration. Game meat was considered the preserve of royalty only.

In the 1300s, Sumptuary Laws were introduced, which strictly restricted meat consumption by social class.

The 1700s gave us the Enclosure Acts, removing the ability to farm cows from millions of ordinary people.

It’s the same all over the world and throughout history: the ruling classes hoard the animal products for themselves, and foist a “plant-based” diet on the lower classes (think pottage, porridge, gruel) - and it is exactly the same today.

Ordinary people are encouraged to base their diets on historic peasant foods - grains, pulses, starchy veg - whilst the ruling classes eat as ever they did - steak, salmon, caviar, cream.

The justification for these dietary hierarchies in the past was class-based - poor people don’t deserve animal products - and now it’s morality-based - good people don’t eat animal products - but the result is the same: a well-nourished, strong and powerful ruling class, and a nutritionally depleted, weak and dysfunctional mass populace, far less likely to revolt against their rulers.

That of course is the reason every ruling class in history has restricted meat consumption for those they count on to serve them: because it keeps them in a weakened, less powerful and rebellious state.

Zoos which keep omnivorous primates often limit or stop altogether these animals’ meat consumption for precisely the same reason.

John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the eponymous Cornflakes, also recognised just how much meat increased people’s vitality and vigour, which - as a staunchly anti-sex Christian who reportedly never even consummated his own marriage - is what inspired him to replace the traditional breakfast fare of meat and eggs with a virtuous vegan starch.

Kellogg believed - quite correctly, in fact - that removing animal products from the diet reduced the sex drive, and therefore would curb the scourge of teenage masturbation (yes, that is genuinely what Cornflakes were invented to do!).

And it’s what vegan diets do generally, even if that’s not any longer the overt intention behind them - strip people’s vitality and vigour, in all areas.

However, just because veganism is bad and meat is good doesn’t mean we should just eat meat. The ruling classes who have historically prized animal products, didn’t only eat meat. The Tudor kings and other elites weren’t doing keto.

And that brings us back to the critical point and the title of this essay...

The increasing conversion to carnivore or very low-carb diets is an understandable reflex against centuries of awful, unhealthy dietary dogmas.

However, it has created a new problem: a class of metabolically inflexible people who would face absolute catastrophe if the food supply was to be suddenly dramatically disrupted, meat was no longer widely - or cheaply - available, and the main food source available for the non-elites became, once again, cheap carbohydrates.

We know there has been a lot of talk recently about disrupted food chains, and the threat of empty supermarket shelves, with even rumours of impending rationing, so all this makes me think... has the whole carnivore / keto trend been another one of the ruling classes’ cynical long-game scams?

Think about it: they have severely restricted meat consumption for ordinary people for hundreds of years, including, not infrequently, subjecting them to extreme brutality to stop them eating it... but suddenly, they just decided to give all that up, put affordable meat on every supermarket shelf, and have big-name influencers push the benefits of eating mostly or exclusively meat?

Keto and carnivore are, after all, no longer fringe eating regimes, restricted to the murkiest corners of the internet - everyone knows what they are, and many big celebrities are known to follow such diets.

So clearly, the ruling classes want us to know about them and to consider following them... which, as we know from long experience, they wouldn’t do if a) this was actually good for us in the long-term, and b) there wasn’t anything in it for them.

Here’s a theoretical scenario, set in the not-too-distant future, to consider: supply chains break down due to some fake war or pretend pandemic, and food becomes scarce and expensive - including and especially, meat.

To avoid food hoarding by some and starvation by others, the government introduces a food rationing scheme, much like the UK experienced in the war. Just like in the war, items like potatoes and other cheap plants might remain relatively abundant, whilst rationing would hit animal products the hardest.

In wartime Britain, a weekly ration for an adult contained on average:

1 shilling and 2 pence worth of meat (approximately 2 chops)

4oz of bacon (about 4 rashers)

2oz of cheese (2 standard slices)

1 egg

That’s not rations for a day: that’s a week.

How could you survive on that as a carnivore?

Obviously you couldn’t: you’d have to eat the carbs, or you’d die.

But what if, when you ate the carbs, you felt like you were dying, having been in ketosis for so long that you’re now severely insulin resistant and can’t tolerate them?

Is our ruling class evil enough to intentionally make hordes of people (and often, people of a conspiratorial bent, who are more likely to be drawn to keto and carnivore regimes) unable to tolerate carbohydrates... and then stage a situation where carbohydrates are the only food available?

Why yes, I do believe, based on innumerable historical examples, that they are. And I suppose intentionally inducing insulin resistance in millions of people is a little more civilised than blinding and castration, after all...

So here is my overriding message - the “meat me half-way” of the title...

Yes, it’s very important to eat animal products and not be vegan, for optimal health, for yourself and for the planet (see Lierre Keith book).

But it’s also important to ensure that, in an emergency, you would be able to survive without access to abundant animal products, and that your body can easily handle sugars and carbohydrates, just as it is designed to do.

If you’ve been on a low-carb diet for a long time, and a single slice of sourdough, or a couple of roast potatoes, make you feel utterly horrendous for several subsequent hours or even days, please consider that this is not proof of the inherent evilness of carbs. Rather, it is proof of a dysfunction in your own body, that can be fixed - and that it might be worth trying to fix now, whilst you can, rather than later, when you’re forced to.

What I have learned is that the way to actually fix insulin resistance - not just mask its symptoms - is to do what bears do: eat sugars - fruit, honey, possibly white rice - but in isolation. Not with protein, and definitely not with fat.

This is what seems to teach the cells how to handle sugar again with a normal insulin response, and there’s more details about it in this book (which, as the reviews state, many turn to after years of paleo / keto / carnivore have ultimately failed them). It’s also well worth going down the Ray Peat rabbit hole, if you haven’t done so already.

The sugar-only diet isn’t meant to be adhered to long term, and you can even do it “half and half” - sugar only in the morning, and then a low-carb, meat-based meal in the evening. Just keep the fats and sugars clearly separate until your insulin resistance has resolved. This is about resetting the body to be metabolically flexible, as it is designed to be.

This obviously isn’t a licence to start binging on pizza and ice cream, and I continue to believe, in the long-run, a meat-based, low-ish carb diet (around 100-150g a day, if you’re not trying to lose weight; less if you are) is the best, the healthiest, and the most sustainable.

But if we’re ever in a position where we need to survive solely on potatoes, pulses, and puritanical breakfast cereals, then we need to be able to do it, without instantly going into a diabetic coma.

Tedious disclaimer: I’m not a nutritional professional and this isn’t meant to be conflated with official medical advice (since this might actually work...), but reversing insulin resistance really is possible through diet and supplementation (olive leaf extract and berberine are very good, and as or more effective than the diabetes drug metformin, but with none of the nasty side effects).

And it might be more important than ever to do it now: not just for your health, but, perhaps even more compellingly - for conspiratorial reasons.

(And Paul really is dead, by the way.)

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