Reading/June - "If you let fear start driving some of your decisions, sooner or later, it will drive them all."

The Meat Fix: How a lifetime of healthy eating nearly killed me! by John Nicholson

Veronica Mars: The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham

Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

Go Kill Crazy! by Bryan Smith

NeanderThin by Ray Audette

Batman: No Man's Land V1-4 by Various

Batman: Venom by Dennis O'Neil, Trevor Von Eeden and Jose Luiz Garcia-Lopez

Young Avengers V2: Alternative Culture by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

Excerpts after the break:


Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

There’s a reason human beings shake hands, hold hands, slap hands, bump hands. It comes from our very earliest memories, when we all come into the world blinded by light and color, deafened by riotous sound, flailing in a suddenly cavernous space without any way of orienting ourselves, shuddering with cold, emptied with hunger, and justifiably frightened and confused. And what changes that first horror, that original state of terror? The touch of another person’s hands... The first thing we ever learn is that the touch of someone else’s hand can ease pain and make things better. That’s power. That’s power so fundamental that most people never even realize it exists.

Sunset isn’t just a star orbiting below the relative horizon of the planet. It’s a shift in supernatural energy. Don’t believe me? Go out far away from the lights of civilization sometime, and sit down, all by yourself, where there aren’t any buildings or cars or telephones or crowds of people. Go sit down, quietly, and wait for the light to fade. Feel the shadows lengthening. Feel the creatures that stay quiet during the day start to stir and come out. Feel that low instinct of nervous trepidation rising up in your gut. That’s how your body translates that energy to your senses.

And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?

Will you have doughnuts?” I looked past him to the snack table. It was indeed piled with doughnuts of a number of varieties. Some of them even had sprinkles. My mouth started a quick impression of a minor tributary. But they were doughnuts of darkness. Evil, damned doughnuts, tainted by the spawn of darkness . . . . . . which could obviously be redeemed only by passing through the fiery, cleansing inferno of a wizardly digestive tract...  I secured a doughnut and coffee. I checked with Karrin and Valmont. Neither wanted to save the doughnuts from Nicodemus’s corruptive influence. Not everyone can be a crusader like me.

The dead don’t need justice. That’s for those of us who are left looking down at the remains.

“In other words,” he said, “despite all the things you know, and all the incredible things you can do . . . you’re only human.” I frowned at him and swigged beer. “Then why,” Michael asked, “are you expecting perfection out of yourself? Do you really think you’re that much better than the rest of us? That your powers make you a higher quality of human being? That your knowledge places you on a higher plane than everyone else on this world?” I eyed the beer and felt . . . embarrassed. “That’s arrogance, Harry,” he said gently. “On a level so deep you don’t even realize it exists. And do you know why it’s there?” “No?” I asked. He smiled again. “Because you have set a higher standard for yourself. You think that because you have more power than others, you have to do more with it.”

“It’s . . . about choices, Waldo. About faith. You have an array of facts in front of you that can fit any of several truths. You have to choose what you’re going to allow to drive your decisions about how to deal with those facts.”

...fear is a terrible, insidious thing, Waldo. It taints and stains everything it touches. If you let fear start driving some of your decisions, sooner or later, it will drive them all. I decided that I’m not going to be the kind of person who lives her life in fear.

“It isn’t complicated. You just open up and let someone in. And whatever comes after that, you face it together.” “It isn’t that simple.” “The hell it isn’t. You had a chance for that and you turned it down? You’re a fucking idiot.

The thing about training of any kind is that you get held back by an absolute limit—it freaking hurts. Little injuries mount up, robbing you of your drive, degrading the efficiency of whatever training you’re into, creating imbalances and points of relative weakness

NeanderThin by Ray Audette

You can never know or account for all the variables involved in the functioning of a system as complex as the human body.

Some alien proteins, however, cause the immune system to attack the body itself, resulting in any one of the plethora of immune system diseases which abound in modern civilization. These proteins are introduced into the body through the consumption of unnatural foods that would not be available in a natural environment Diseases of the immune system include arthritis, diabetes, allergies, colitis, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, endometriosis, many forms of cancer, lupus, and most arterial diseases (heart attacks and strokes).

Other diseases that are not traditionally thought of as immune system disorders, such as epilepsy, tooth decay, myopia, appendicitis, mental illness, attention deficit disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, acne, and emphysema, are also rare in nature.

It was noted that, although the native population might be wiped out by infectious disease (smallpox, measles, mumps, etc.) at the outset of their contact with civilization, what we know as chronic immune system diseases were unknown to them. Only when the natives were introduced to the civilized foods did the "diseases of civilization" appear in their populations—in direct proportion to the degree of exposure. As with allergies, other immune system diseases seem to exhibit a threshold of response. That is, until a certain level of exposure is achieved there is seemingly no reaction. You can be exposed to a specific allergen for years with no noticeable reaction and then suddenly develop symptoms. For instance, a tiny amount of pollen may trigger a hay fever attack if the immune system is already stressed by other allergies that, by themselves, cause no response. All immune system diseases seem to appear suddenly even though the alien proteins that cause them may have been present for years. This type of delayed reaction is necessary to prevent the body from responding to alien proteins that may be transitory or unable to survive in the environment found within the body for very long. By waiting until a threshold level is attained, the body avoids undue stress and conserves energy.

Do Eat: Meats and Fish Fruits Vegetables Nuts and Seeds Berries
Don't Eat: Grains Beans Potatoes Dairy Sugar

Veronica Mars: The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas, Jennifer Graham

That was a drunk’s best trick, after all—spread the blame around, let everyone take part in the dysfunction.

Go Kill Crazy! by Bryan Smith

There was a certain kind of fragile, possibly damaged soul that was eager to believe in an imminent collapse of the social order. These people saw the modern world as corrupt to the core, as a festering cesspool tainted by excessive greed and self-interest. It was a viewpoint John was able to exploit with instinctive ease and skill. He told his new audience the things he knew they wanted to hear, affirmations of all their darkest fears. He talked to them about how there was a handful of mysterious and very powerful men who controlled the bulk of the global economy and pulled the strings of political leaders behind the scenes. It was essentially a repackaging of the Illuminati myth, though he never used that term out of concern it would invoke kneejerk skepticism. But his followers found it easy to believe in a shadowy collective that controlled world affairs and relentlessly trampled on the downtrodden. After a while, John began to infuse his sermons with warnings of a coming revolution, a time when the downtrodden would rise up and wrest control of the world out of the hands of the puppeteers. The popularity of the Order began to surge, at least in part because so many of those damaged souls he’d courted also wanted to believe in revolution...

The Meat Fix: How a lifetime of healthy eating nearly killed me! by John Nicholson

Once you grasp the fact that we are little more than a speck of dust that comes and goes in the blinking of the cosmic eye, then it deflates the hubris and pomposity so innate to our species. Maybe if we could keep that in mind, we’d stop beating the crap out of each other and spend our short lives in more peace and harmony. Or maybe it just isn’t in our headbanger monkey DNA to do that. When I started eating meat again, this experience at the house came back to me very powerfully. I realised that by being a vegetarian I had got away from this essential understanding of our place in the scheme of things and had tried to elevate myself outside of our place as animals in the cycle of life and death as though we were excluded from the wheel of existence somehow. That what I had chosen to do by being a vegetarian was, at core, deeply unnatural, despite the fact that for the whole time I didn’t eat meat I would have argued the exact opposite was true.

There is no divorcing what we consume from how we are both physically and mentally.

That choice to stop eating meat made so long ago, born out of a rebellion against my upbringing, psychedelic drugs and a counter-culture sensibility, had messed us up badly. I was fat, exhausted, had very high cholesterol and was suffering from crippling IBS. I was falling apart and heading into middle age feeling well past my best and it was, frankly, bloody depressing. Your lesson here is that oldest of adages, get it printed on a T-shirt, hell, I’ll even print it on a T-shirt for you: Never Trust a Hippy.

It’s a weird feeling being offended by yourself, or at least it is for someone like me who isn’t prone to too much self-loathing. But I looked at that and I thought, you fat bastard, you look just like your dad did. This was not a good thing, especially given how it ended for him on the sofa aged just sixty-five. In fact, we’d both put so much weight on over the years that we were now struggling to walk up Edinburgh’s many hilly streets without feeling breathless and tired out afterwards. It was pathetic really. Why were we doing this to ourselves? It wasn’t as if getting fat was making life any more pleasurable or comfortable. We were complacent in our self-appointed healthy diet as though it offered protection from such a condition – clearly it hadn’t.

Indeed, one of the ENT specialists Dawn saw hadn’t even heard of hormonal rhinitis, a condition which is documented on the NHS website and which could have been the cause. When you know more than the specialist, you inevitably lose faith in the system.

Then one day Dawn dropped a massive bombshell; not one of those small bombshells, oh no, this was a proper, big nuclear bombshell. ‘We should eat meat,’ she said, flatly. The words made me go as cold as ice. Her words were a freezing bolt of electricity. My first response was the obvious one. ‘Why?’ ‘Because all our health issues are being caused not just by what we are eating but also by what we’re not eating. Not eating meat is the problem,’ she said, enigmatically, as is her wont. Fucking hell, I thought. But, but, but … I’m not a meat eater. I fought against the idea for days, wrestling with it in my mind. The idea hurt my sense of personal identity and challenged my whole moral and political outlook. Perhaps even more than that, it meant changing habits built up over twenty-six years. I had a comfortable, default position and it meant ditching that and starting out on a new path. That intimidated me and made me resist it initially but was actually also what finally persuaded me to do it. It was something new and different and even though I didn’t really want to admit it to myself for a while, that was quite exciting. A new, meaty vista to explore was intriguing.

The sensitivity to the blood and the slaughter was just a veneer I’d chosen to apply back in 1984, but I now see that’s exactly what it was, a veneer, an assumed attitude. Perhaps this is what all self-imposed morals are. There is nothing intrinsic about any morality we create; it is essentially a fabrication and they vary from generation to generation, culture to culture. What is heinous in one era is trivial in another. For example, when I was young, children born out of wedlock were a sinful disgrace, but now no one is bothered. I was sure I really believed in being a non-meat eater but when push came to shove, I didn’t really. Underneath, I hadn’t really changed.

I’ve since reflected on this moment at length. I firmly believe it was one of the most profound of my life. In the few minutes it took me to eat that rib-eye, I was changed. That first mouthful, the way it tasted and the way it made me feel emotionally, was too genuinely profound to ignore. As I put my knife and fork down, I knew immediately from my response that my body was trying to tell me something, trying to tell me that this was the right thing to eat. I had gorged on it, devouring the whole 300g of it quickly. I had never felt like this before. The degree of satisfaction and satiation I experienced wasn’t like any meal I’d had as a vegetarian. This caught me utterly by surprise.

Everything most of us know about healthy eating is wrong. The healthy eating guidelines have not made us healthy, quite the opposite: they made me and have made many others very sick. We have record levels of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, digestive problems, depression, food intolerances and allergies. These conditions have been blamed on us, on our bad habits and greed and not the healthy eating advice, which in turn has been elevated to an almost holy status.

...people want to knock down the latest fad diet and the theories that go with it – and fair enough if you want to do that – but one thing a few hours of research shows you is that there are so few hard and fast facts about food, diet and how it affects us that trying to take the intellectual high ground, whichever side you come from, never looks convincing. Even the most definitive statements tend to come with some caveats. And let’s not forget that ‘official science’ has delivered us a right bunch of old rubbish over the years and passed it off as hard fact. Drugs such as Thalidomide had previously been declared safe that were extremely harmful. Conditions and diseases are routinely falsely diagnosed and cures given that didn’t and don’t work. They told us, unequivocally, that cholesterol in eggs would kill us. Then realised that was wrong. They said the same thing about too much salt and now that’s disputed. They originally said trans-fats were healthier than animal fats – now they know they got that one wrong. Had non-medically qualified researchers argued they were wrong on those three issues at the time – and they did – they would have been decried as quacks. But they would have been right.

The theory is if a selection of peers in similar fields review the work and declare it interesting and well done, then it can be published and be regarded to have some credibility. If your work has not been peer reviewed, many will just dismiss it as worthless or at best just a piece of speculation or opinion. While I can see the value of this to some degree, at least in theory, it is a very flawed system as history has surely proved. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of peer-reviewed pieces of work and research that went on to be proven as nonsense. It is far from an infallible system...

Who is peer reviewing the peer reviews? Are they all of equal merit? What common standard is used to judge the efficacy of their work? It all seems a bit of a botched job to me. In theory it might be OK, but in practice, science, just like the arts, is every bit as subjected to the biases, whims and egos of those involved. The idea that it’s all super-brainy people looking totally objectively and comprehensively at new research is to misunderstand human nature.

Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the The Lancet, Britain’s primo medical journal said: The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability – not the validity – of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.
It’s worth bearing this in mind when you read comments on websites and blogs criticising any theories as not being peer reviewed and, thus, unreliable. Whether it’s been peer reviewed seems less important; whether it’s right or not is much more pertinent.

Yes, we all get led up the garden path sometimes and end up buying some useless potion or product, but that is exactly what happens in a doctor’s surgery too. ‘Try this and if it doesn’t work, come back and we’ll try something else.’ It’s the doctor’s mantra. We’ve all heard it. What it really means is, ‘I have a range of things that I can prescribe but I don’t know which one if any will work.’ If this was said by an amateur or an alternative therapist they would be laughed at. But it seems OK in the doctor’s surgery.

I did believe, however, that there was a fairly settled medical view on what was and wasn’t healthy and I was also pretty sure that my wholegrain, zero-cholesterol and low-saturated fat diet was on the right side of the fence. If I had ever been in any doubt, doctors and health centre nutritionists had reaffirmed it. They couldn’t all be wrong could they? Well, yes. Pretty much. I was a walking, or rather, hobbling example of how destructive it can be, wasn’t I?

The cholesterol we eat doesn’t affect the amount in our blood. Who knew? Not me, not you I’d wager. For years the authorities said it did and they told us to be careful how much we ate didn’t they? I didn’t just dream that did I? No. It really happened. Well they got it wrong. Oops. Trouble is, many people, going back thirty years, always thought it was rubbish. Many in the medical community spoke out against it at the time it was established as ‘truth’. However, through a long and complex mixture of effective lobbying, marketing and misinterpreted, hurried and selective science, it became established as a truth and one which was sent out as gospel to every doctor’s surgery since the early 1980s.

Ancel Keys, the man whose much disputed studies in the 1950s led eventually, via a long and tortuous route, to the current state of play on cholesterol, said quite unequivocally, in 1997, ‘There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood. And we’ve known that all along.’ Now, just three years after he said that my doctor told me that up to 30 per cent of the cholesterol in my blood came from my diet, which I knew simply couldn’t have been true because I didn’t eat any cholesterol. One hundred per cent of my cholesterol came from some other freakin’ place.

However, as we’ve seen from the NHS, the official healthy eating advice has shifted a little from this position on cholesterol consumption to being paranoid about saturated fat instead. So despite previously being 100 per cent wrong in saying the cholesterol you eat contributes to your blood cholesterol level and despite them telling us not to eat more than a couple of eggs a week for fear of dropping dead from all that delicious cholesterol, they still want us to believe their latest advice, whatever it is, is correct. Well we’re entitled to ask why the hell we should, I reckon, don’t you? Had we questioned their advice on cholesterol they’d have assured us it was correct, just as they do now on saturated fat.

If you are healthy there is marginal evidence that statins prevent heart attacks or strokes. One meta-analysis (that just means it rolls together lots of different bits of research) showed that in healthy patients there was only a 0.6 per cent reduction in mortality. In other words, physicians would need to treat between 100 and 450 patients with a statin for more than four years to prevent one death.

In an eight-year long heart study, researchers observed 10,000 people with high cholesterol levels. Half of them received a best-selling statin drug. The other half were simply told to eat a normal diet and get enough exercise. The results stunned the researchers. Although the statin drug did indeed lower serum cholesterol, this had no impact whatsoever on death rate, non-fatal heart attacks and fatal arterial disease. In other words, the statin-users had zero advantage over those who received no treatment at all … lowering cholesterol either through drugs or low-fat diets does not lower the risk of developing heart disease.

Heart disease is not caused by saturated fat nor elevated blood cholesterol; people with low cholesterol levels live shorter lives; populations consuming high saturated fat diets often enjoy very low rates of heart disease; many dietary recommendations made by ‘experts’ to reduce heart disease have actually been shown in animal and human studies to increase heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity; the primary force behind the anti-cholesterol paradigm is not public health, but profit! Once you read these books, it’s not possible to believe unequivocally the advice from the NHS. But sit down opposite your doctor and say this and they will get narky almost immediately, start moving around uncomfortably in their chair, type ‘troublemaker’ onto your notes and then they will issue the party line once again. Along with a prescription for statins.

In my experience, they are not likely to have read any of the books challenging the commonly accepted view of cholesterol. I have yet to meet a doctor who will even engage in debate on the matter. It is as though they believe it is a 100 per cent watertight argument. They will assert the orthodoxy as though there is no doubt about cholesterol and that their knowledge is absolute. This is why so many of us find doctors infuriating. They display too much certainty in matters which are undoubtedly in dispute. I know they don’t want to look weak or stupid but to not address these issues at all and to pretend they don’t exist or are little better than witchcraft or superstition demeans us all and undermines their own credibility.

No mention that there always were scientists, doctors and researchers who said it was all rubbish and who were ignored. Whole industries grew up to service the low cholesterol food demands that arose due to this hypothesis. I remember seeing ‘eggbeaters’ for the first time in California twenty years ago. They were commonplace over there and had been since the late 1970s: merely a carton of egg white, with the cholesterol-rich egg yolks removed. You could order an egg white omelette in restaurants too. But as it turns out, there was absolutely no point at all in eating such things. A waste of your time. Indeed, you were missing out on all the good nutrition in the egg yolk.

Rowbotham and Clayton found that this peak of good health began to decline around 1900 with the introduction of the first processed foods and when sugar became cheaper. It is quite shocking to realise that, for most people, longevity has not increased much since those times. No, not even skimmed milk and low-fat spread – which has been so common for the last twenty years – has made any difference. In fact things have, in real terms, got much worse. We have a much higher incidence of heart disease than they did 150 years ago and we keep people alive with drugs and treatments not available to the Victorians. Despite the so-called healthy dietary advice for the last thirty years, the incidence has not dropped.

According to the USDA, we have been eating less red meat, fewer eggs, and more poultry and fish; our average fat intake has dropped from 45 per cent of total calories to less than 35 per cent and National Institutes of Health surveys have documented a coincidental fall in our cholesterol levels. Between 1976 and 1996, there was a 40 per cent decline in hypertension in America, and a 28 per cent decline in the number of individuals with chronically high cholesterol levels. But the evidence does not suggest that these decreases have improved health. Heart disease death rates have indeed dropped over those years … but there is little evidence that the incidence of heart disease has declined, as would be expected if eating less fat made a difference. This was the conclusion, for instance, of a ten-year study of heart disease mortality published in The New England Journal of Medicine which suggested death rates are declining largely because doctors and emergency medical personnel are treating the disease more successfully.

In Hannah Sutter’s superb book Big Fat Lies she says France has a 0.2 per cent rate of death from coronary heart disease (CHD) – the lowest in Europe – and yet they have the highest consumption of saturated fats and the highest amount of people who do no exercise. The UK, often painted as the evil slob of Europe by those who love a bit of self-loathing, eats less saturated fat and does more exercise and yet has more CHD. The French also smoke more than us. If the advice on saturated fat were true, there’d be piles of dead Frenchies on every corner. There isn’t. One speculated reason why there isn’t, is because they eat more natural animal fats rather than vegetable oils and they cook meals from freshly bought ingredients rather than eat fast or processed food. In other words, they eat like we used to.

Soya has a lot of fans now, more so than ever before. It has been eaten in China and the Far East for thousands of years and they thrived on it – or so we thought (though as it’s a communist state and most people live in distant rural villages with little access to the outside world for generations, I’m not quite sure why we thought that). What we failed to appreciate was that they ate soya almost exclusively as tofu, which is little more than the curds of ground soya beans and water, or as tempeh, which is fermented beans. I liked tempeh, even though it looks like a growth you’d find in a disused toilet. This is a long way from eating the contrived, industrialised form of soya we’ve been hoovering up for thirty years and it is often held to be the case that these more ancient forms of soya foods are actually beneficial to health when eaten occasionally. It certainly sounds more likely.

There’s nothing natural about not eating animals. If anything is part of nature, it is killing things to eat them if you can. The hunter and the hunted is the story of all existence.

If the natural flavours in natural flavouring looked natural to us, they’d list them. The fact is it’s probably a food laboratory creation with little more than a code name to identify it. And that doesn’t look so nice on your wholesome green box of natural goodness.

...until the early 1980s, it was common knowledge that if you wanted to lose weight, you should cut out potatoes, bread and rice.

While there are many, many alternative healthy eating ideas and diets, the one thing just about all of them are agreed on is that the Eat Well plate is just bad advice and that over-consumption of carbohydrate is causing obesity and the whole host of the degenerative diseases we see around us, especially combined with the inflammation provoked by the imbalance between omega-3 and omega-6 in the modern-day diet.

So many of our eating habits are just that: habits. They’re not choices really, they’re just things we eat by default because we can’t think of anything else. But life doesn’t fall apart when you reject these common, everyday foods and when you feel so good in body and mind by doing so it is more than enough reward for making the effort.

It [wheat] contains amylopectin A, which is more efficiently converted to blood sugar than just about any other carbohydrate, including table sugar. In fact, two slices of wholewheat bread increase blood sugar to a higher level than a candy bar does.

So let’s say you have an English muffin for breakfast. Two hours later you’re starving, so you have a handful of crackers, and then some potato chips, and your blood sugar rises again. That cycle of highs and lows just keeps going throughout the day, so you’re constantly feeling hungry and constantly eating.

We feel instinctively that wheat is natural and wholesome but considering twenty-first century wheat is a modern creation, very different from its ancestors, the idea that it’s some ancient, traditional food is turned on its head. Everyone in the industry pretends like it hasn’t changed in the 5,000 years we’ve been eating it, like your daily loaf is little different from that baked by your ancestors in the Middle Ages, but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s just another way that we’ve been led away from questioning the foodstuffs that are so commonplace and so omnipresent in our lives.

It seems eminently sensible to me that a diet high in starchy bulk was established when we lived very different, physically demanding lives, like my grandparents did. Foods such as potatoes and bread were cheap for the poor to fill up on when few other options were available. It was also a diet which, though high in starchy foods, had little or no processed food either and often little sugar. In other words, the context within which it was eaten was very different to today. It is the unique modern combination of high-carb foods, processed foods, high sugars, sweeteners and high fructose corn syrups along with highly processed vegetable oils that provide the witches’ brew that has destroyed so many people’s health.

We know food affects our brain chemistry, no one denies that, but go to a doctor and suggest you are depressed or disturbed because of the food you eat and they’re not likely to be sympathetic. They’ll pretty quickly issue you with a prescription for strong narcotics to combat your depression without even stopping for a moment to consider if a change of diet could be the solution. I know, I’ve seen it happen. Yeah, good work, doc. How long were you at university? Not long enough...

People have been convinced to buy semi-skimmed and skimmed milk for fear of having a big fat greasy heart attack and so that is where the high demand is these days. By skimming out the fat, you are of course losing most of what is best about milk, leaving a watery excuse behind with much less nutrition but hey, we’re so freakin’ wealthy we can do what we like.

Stay away from fruit juice. I’ve actually now stopped drinking it because it suddenly struck me as a bizarre intense form of freaky food. A kind of processed food in fact. Squeeze an orange and see how much juice you get out of it – it’s not much, A standard 250ml glass is like eating seven or eight oranges. You’d never do that. You’d never eat more than two at one time because the fibre from the orange would fill you up. Your body naturally regulates consumption in that way but by drinking fruit juice, you’re by-passing that regulation. It comes in a big carton so we pour it out by the glassful thinking that it’s healthy, so drinking more has to be more healthy. Wrong. It’s a bit mad really. We expect our digestive system to handle anything we throw at it in any quantity. It must piss our guts right off. ‘What the hell are they doing throwing all this sugary stuff down us? Right, everybody out. We’re going on strike.’ I used to get rotten indigestion from fruit juice and acid reflux when I was a big fat lad. Fruit juice is a big hit of fructose which spikes your insulin and may contribute to weight gain. I know it sounds weird saying fat doesn’t make you fat and fruit juice does – but it’s true.

Perhaps I’m weird but the fact that every person on earth seems to drink cans of fizzy pop really does my head in – as you may have guessed in the previous chapter. All that sugar, all those artificial sweeteners and fuck-with-your-brain flavourings. I mean, just how did it become so cool, so bloody requisite to have your hand wrapped around one of these cans every day, several times a day? Is it the colour of the cans, the logos, the taste or all of the above? Maybe they’re really properly addictive.

The more I read, the more I feel vegetable oils are at the heart of so many health and weight issues. They’re so unnatural, so industrially produced, so high in omega-6 and I’m not convinced that our bodies have any idea what to do with them, especially once they’ve been subjected to heat which damages them and turns them into free radicals.

Wheat sounds natural but it really isn’t. It’s a highly contrived crop which we’re familiar with so we think it’s as natural as the trees and the sky. It’s not actually that high in nutrition either. Don’t forget that most industrially produced bread is made with fortified flour precisely because there isn’t much in the way of nutrition in wheat. So it’s not as if, by excluding it from your diet, you’re missing out on something you can’t get elsewhere.

You won’t miss eating wheat, trust me, I’m not a doctor. What you might miss is the things that are used to flavour wheat. You might miss pizza but how often did you just eat a pizza base with nothing on? You might miss toast but you never ate it dry. You might miss biscuits but they’re always sweetened and flavoured. In other words, it’s the flavourings that you’re missing not the wheat itself, most of the time. So just keep eating tasty food and as long as you do so, life goes on as normal. It’s not a big deal.

Cook everything from scratch and you have the power. You rule and you get the benefits both nutritional and also psychological. You have seized the reins of your own life and are controlling the show instead of being controlled. You are the puppet master not the puppet. It’s about freedom and independence and not being a lab rat for the food processing industry whose interest is in their profit and not your health. Remember, it’s not their job to make healthy food for you, it’s their job to make profitable food for themselves – the rest of it is just marketing bullshit.

Someone said to me that they loved beer, chips and pies so much that the quality of their life would be seriously diminished if they adopted a diet that excluded those things. It’s understandable as a viewpoint. At least it would be if it was genuinely true. But I don’t think it really is. Such beliefs are delusions and habituations.

I’m not prone to conspiracy theories... On this issue, though, I really do wonder. I suppose if any government came out and said, ‘Hang on lads, we’ve screwed up, stop eating grains, stop eating lowfat spreads and skimmed milk and start eating more butter, lard, eggs and meat,’ the consequences for all the industries that are behind those products would be potentially catastrophic. It would change farming and therefore the land and the environment.

The food processing industry is one of the biggest on earth. Naturally, it doesn’t want us to stop eating processed food and start cooking for ourselves from separate ingredients now, does it? Of course not. Nor does it want us to eat less food. Less food means less profit. A fat dude is a profitable dude. Imagine if word got around that eating more fat stopped you getting as hungry and stopped you eating as much. It’d totally, well, knacker I think would be the technically correct economic term, all those industries that produce tasty little snacks to tide you over until your next big meal. Lots of money and lots of jobs rely on such industries. Imagine what havoc would be wreaked on the grain industries if we all stopped, or even substantially reduced, eating bread and other grains. These industries are way too big and way too powerful to let this happen. That’s what I’d think if I was a paranoid man. I’d think that they’d spend as much money as it took to persuade a lot of politicians, doctors and scientists to push the idea that whatever you made money from was essential for life itself and that not eating them will make the sky fall in. And I’d keep spending that money until the job was done.

The trouble is, we’ve got an economy that has become geared up to sell us utter shite. Take a look around your supermarket. Almost everything they sell is some sort of indulgence and far from being an essential foodstuff. There’s thirty foot of shelving dedicated to the all fat-inducing, no-nutrition, waste of money that is potato crisps. Another thirty foot dedicated to bloat-me-up-baby sugar and carb-packed biscuits and confectionery. Hey and how about another thirty foot full of bread products – how’s your gluten intolerance doing? There’s about double that dedicated to bloody breakfast cereals, all of which purport to be a healthy way to start the day but are little different to pouring milk onto chocolate biscuits or hob nobs. Just because it’s got oats, dried fruit or 100 per cent of your daily fibre in it doesn’t make it healthy.