HMB

This story is from a 2023 Hamburg trial: German Judge Anne Meier-Göring let eight migrant men go free after they gang r*ped a 15-year-old girl for three hours, ruling “migration frustration” a factor. Freed men are Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, Moroccan, Turkish, and Bulgarian.

The pemmican bar has been cooking the protein industry for over 5000 years. Pemmican is dried meat, pounded fine, mixed with rendered fat at roughly a 50/50 ratio by weight, sometimes with dried berries pressed in. The Plains Indians had been making it for millennia. The process took meat that would spoil in days and turned it into something that lasted years. Not in a cool cupboard. Not vacuum sealed. In a leather bag. At ambient temperature. For years. Hudson's Bay Company traders in the 1700s ran their entire operation on it. Voyageurs paddling twelve to eighteen hours a day across the Canadian interior consumed it as the bulk of their diet. Lewis and Clark brought it west. Sir John Franklin brought it to the Arctic. The British Army field ration trials of the late 19th century examined it seriously. It featured in polar expeditions into the 20th century. Here is why it worked, and why your overpriced ancestral bar with coconut nectar and collagen does not. Fat provides nine calories per gram. Protein provides four. The standard pemmican ratio meant that somewhere around seventy percent of its calories came from saturated animal fat. Not as a guilty indulgence. As the primary fuel source. The result: stable, sustained energy over twelve to eighteen hours of hard physical labour, with no blood sugar spike, no crash, no need for constant re-feeding. The fat was slow-burning. The protein maintained tissue. Together they covered virtually every metabolic need a working human body has. The Cree and the Blackfoot didn't arrive at this ratio because they had a nutritionist. They arrived at it because they had generations of observational data about what happened when people ate it and what happened when people didn't. They noticed that lean meat alone left men declining. They noticed that the fat was not optional. They noticed that the combination of fat and dried meat produced something that a man could work hard on for a very long time without needing much else. This knowledge was then borrowed wholesale by the European fur trade, refined for long-distance transport, and used to power one of the most physically demanding commercial enterprises in North American history. It was later quietly set aside when seed oil shortages ceased to be a problem and processed food became profitable. Your modern ancestral bar, in the meantime, is an underpowered mix of protein, a sliver of fat, and a big dump of sugar. It will spike your insulin, leave you hungry in ninety minutes, and cost you four quid for the luxury. Pemmican needs to come back. Not as a boutique product from a man in a waxed jacket at a farmers' market. As a staple. As what it always was. Shelf-stable, calorically efficient, metabolically complete animal food that the people who actually had to survive on food, rather than merely consume it for sport, understood perfectly well centuries before anyone invented the concept of a "clean eating snack."

India ran the most important cardiovascular study of the 20th century by accident, and then immediately forgot about it. In 1967, Dr. S.L. Malhotra published a study in the British Heart Journal examining heart disease rates among 1.5 million Indian railway employees. The population was extraordinarily useful for research purposes: same employer, same healthcare access, comparable income and working conditions, spread across the entire country. The only meaningful variable was geography. Which meant diet. North Indian railway workers: Punjab, Rajasthan, UP, ate a diet built around ghee and dairy fat. They consumed up to 19 times more fat than their southern counterparts. The fat was primarily saturated: clarified butter, milk fat, the short-chain saturated fatty acids that Ancel Keys had recently been telling the Western world were arterial death. South Indian railway workers ate a diet based on rice, sambar, and seed oils: groundnut oil and sesame oil, primarily. They ate considerably less fat overall. By the standards of dietary advice being formulated in the 1960s, they should have been the healthy ones. Heart disease mortality in South India: 135 per 100,000. Heart disease mortality in North India: 20 per 100,000. Seven times higher in the population eating seed oils. Among railway sweepers specifically, the lowest-paid, most physically active workers, the gap was even wider. Heart disease was fifteen times more common in the South Indian sweeper population than in the North Indian sweeper population. Malhotra controlled for everything he could reach: smoking, where Northerners actually smoked more. Activity levels, where the relationship was inconsistent. Socioeconomic status, where executives died more often than sweepers regardless of region. He found no variable that explained the gap except the type of fat in the diet. He published the data. In a peer-reviewed journal. In 1967. The study was cited periodically, acknowledged as methodologically interesting, and then set aside. The decade in which Malhotra published was the decade in which Ancel Keys's fat hypothesis was being converted into policy. The American Heart Association was issuing guidance recommending polyunsaturated vegetable oils as replacements for saturated animal fats. The food industry was producing seed oils at industrial scale. The infrastructure of seed oil promotion was being built, expensively and with great institutional momentum. A study showing that populations eating animal fat had a fraction of the heart disease of populations eating seed oils was not, in that context, a study that anyone particularly wanted to follow up. Nobody followed up. Almost sixty years later, the finding stands unrefuted in the literature. It is not in the dietary guidelines.

1958 London: Dr. Richard Mackarness, a British physician, publishes a book with a title that horrifies nutritionists. "Eat Fat and Grow Slim: The Revolutionary Diet That Really Works." The premise is simple but heretical: Fat doesn't make you fat. Carbohydrates do. If you want to lose weight, eat fatty meat and avoid sugar and starch. Mackarness bases this on his own clinical experience treating thousands of obese patients. He'd tried every standard approach - calorie restriction, low-fat diets, portion control. All failed long-term. Patients lost weight temporarily, regained it, became demoralized. Then he discovered older medical literature about low-carbohydrate diets. Banting's work from the 1860s. Pennington's research from the 1940s. He starts prescribing similar approaches to his patients. The results match the historical accounts. Patients eating fatty meat, cheese, cream, and butter while avoiding bread and sugar lose weight consistently. No hunger, no calorie counting, sustainable long-term. He documents case after case in his book. A 40-year-old woman loses 50 pounds eating steak and eggs. A businessman drops 35 pounds while enjoying butter and cream. Over and over, the pattern holds - eliminate carbohydrates, eat fat, weight drops. The book becomes an unexpected bestseller. Over one million copies sold. People try the approach, it works, word spreads. For about 5-7 years, the high-fat diet is mainstream in Britain. Then the American dietary guidelines arrive. The Seven Countries Study. The fat hypothesis. By the late 1960s, Mackarness's approach is considered dangerous pseudoscience. He spends the rest of his career defending his work. Publishing follow-up books, citing clinical success, pointing to patient outcomes. Doesn't matter. The narrative has shifted. Low-fat is dominant. Mackarness dies in 1996. His books are out of print. The thousands of patients he treated successfully with high-fat diets are dismissed as "anecdotal." Modern low-carb advocates rediscovered his work in the 2000s and realized he'd been right all along. Eating fat doesn't make you fat. Eating carbohydrates while insulin-resistant makes you fat. We spent 40 years calling him a quack while obesity rates tripled following the low-fat guidelines that replaced his approach. He had clinical proof. We had industry lobbying. The industry won.