Tim Noakes

Yet, he is ambassador for Lay's Processed Potato Chips? How now.. .

He keeps being sick on the pitch. Not once. Regularly. Lionel Messi, the most gifted footballer anyone has ever watched, vomiting during matches, and for years nobody can tell him why. Barcelona run the tests. The tests come back with nothing. In 2014 he stops asking the club doctors and goes to see an Italian nutritionist called Giuliano Poser. Poser looks at what the best player alive is actually putting in his body and finds pizza, fizzy drinks and refined flour. A schoolboy's diet, carried into his mid-twenties, on top of a professional athlete's training load. The fix was subtraction. Out went the sugar. Out went the refined flour. Out went the processed food. Poser's line on it was blunt: sugar is the worst thing there is for a muscle. In came olive oil, fish, whole food, water. Messi drops around three kilos that were never meant to be there. The sickness stops. The following season he scores 58 goals and wins the treble. The best footballer alive spent his early career quietly poisoned by the same processed, sugared, refined-flour diet a whole generation of children was raised to think was normal, and got well the week a man took it off his plate. And this week he is in a World Cup semi-final, chasing another final, sponsored start to finish by the fizzy drink he had to quit to get there.

Europe's tallest people are clustered in one cold, wet corner of the continent, and they did not get there on rye bread. The Dutch top the list at around six foot, but right behind them come the Scandinavians, Norwegians and Danes pushing five foot eleven and beyond as a national average. These are people whose land grows almost no crops and plenty of grass, water and cold. So they lived off what the ground could actually give: dairy from the cows, fish from the fjords, meat and fat to get a body through a winter that means it. Look at their modern athletes and the diet is still doing its work. Norway, a country of barely five million, keeps turning out enormous, powerful sportsmen who move like the weather that raised them. That is not the fluke of a small population. That is what happens when generation after generation is built on milk, fish and meat instead of a foundation of grain. The warm, fertile, grain-growing belts of the world did not produce the giants. The cold, barren, animal-fed north did. The soil that could not raise a decent loaf raised the tallest people on the continent instead. You do not build a Viking on porridge. You build one on the herd and the sea.

The tallest people on the planet in 1850 had never seen a loaf of bread. They rode the American plains and they lived on buffalo. Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, measured over a thousand of them across eight tribes, and the figures sat forgotten in an archive until two economists, Steckel and Prince, dug them out and published them in the American Economic Review in 2001. The Cheyenne averaged five foot ten. The Sioux and the Blackfeet a shade under. Every plains tribe stood taller than the white settlers pushing west at around five foot six, and taller than every nation in Europe, who were shorter still. The people the United States was busy calling savages were the best-built human beings alive, and the men sent to civilise them had to look up to do it. The diet was the buffalo. Meat, fat, marrow, liver, tongue, the hump, pemmican pounded from dried flesh and rendered fat to carry them through winter. Grain barely featured. The plate a modern dietitian would confiscate built the tallest population in recorded history. Then the herds were wiped out and the same people were handed a government ration of white flour and lard. You already know how that ends. Height is the one national number nobody can spin. It is measured in inches against a doorframe, and the doorframe has never once asked what the guidelines recommend. The tallest men who ever lived were hunting buffalo. A century and a half later, nobody has beaten them on anything a committee would sign off.