Keto-meatheals🌸🩸

Leonardo DiCaprio wants you to stop eating beef for the sake of the planet, and he would like to tell you so from the deck of an oil sheikh's yacht. He is a United Nations Messenger of Peace for the climate. He put his name on Cowspiracy as executive producer. He invested in Beyond Meat and in a vegan burger chain, so the cow is also his competitor. In 2014 he spent the World Cup on the fifth largest yacht on earth, borrowed from a member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family. In 2016 he was reported to have flown 8,000 miles by private jet, from Cannes to New York and back, to collect an award for his environmental work. The burger chain has since gone into liquidation. Beyond Meat's shares have lost almost everything. The planet is being saved at a considerable loss. Meanwhile there is a woman on a hill farm in Cumbria whose family has kept the same flock on the same fell for five generations. She has been to London twice. Her lamb travels 30 miles to market and her annual carbon footprint would not get his jet to the end of the runway. She is the one who has been told to change. He once played a man who survived a winter by crawling inside a dead horse and eating raw bison liver, and won an Oscar for it. It is the most honest thing he has ever said about food, and he was acting.

Two American bioethicists have published a paper arguing that a tick which makes people allergic to red meat ought to be helped to spread. It appeared in the journal Bioethics in July 2025 under the title Beneficial Bloodsucking. The authors are Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth of the medical school at Western Michigan University. The tick is the lone star tick. Its bite can leave you with alpha-gal syndrome, after which beef, lamb and pork bring on hives, vomiting and, in the bad cases, a closing throat, usually some hours after dinner and often in the middle of the night. Milk can do it too. So can the gelatine in a tablet. The CDC thinks as many as 450,000 Americans have it, and last year doctors reported the first confirmed death, a man in New Jersey who had eaten a hamburger. The paper looks at all that and sees a teaching aid. If eating meat is wrong, it reasons, then spreading the syndrome is "strongly pro tanto obligatory", and it notes that editing ticks for the purpose is already feasible. Dr Crutchfield has form. In 2019 he argued that making the public more moral by medical means should be done covertly. Asked about the tick, he said it was a thought experiment, and that he is not himself a vegetarian. It passed peer review. The tick was not consulted, but is understood to be willing.

George Monbiot campaigns for the end of livestock farming, and he is not a serious person. He is a newspaper columnist who believes the most damaging food in Britain is beef raised on grass. Not the feedlot kind. The kind standing on a wet hill eating what grew there. He has put this in a book. He calls the uplands "sheepwrecked" and the sheep a white plague. His alternative for those hills is wolves and lynx, and in one book he gets wistful about elephants. In Wales. He was a vegan who announced in 2010 that he had been wrong about veganism, then announced a few years later that he had been wrong about being wrong. In between he went on Newsnight and skinned and ate a squirrel he had found dead, to make a point. He once tried to perform a citizen's arrest on an American ambassador at a book festival. His plan to feed the country is a bacterium in a steel tank in Finland that eats hydrogen. In 2020 he ate a pancake made from it and declared the end of most agriculture, with the price to match the cheapest protein on earth inside five years. The five years have gone. The sheep have not. For the big finish of his television film against livestock he climbed a Scottish hill, shot a deer, cried, and hoped aloud that wolves would do it next time. So the position, as best anyone can assemble it, is that a lamb on a hillside is an ecological crime, a deer shot by a journalist is conservation, a roadkill squirrel is supper, and dinner for 68 million people will be along shortly from a fermenter. The farmer he wants abolished has fed somebody every day for 40 years without once holding a press conference. Monbiot has fed one man one pancake, and it took a laboratory.

American surgeons pull around 10 million wisdom teeth a year, mostly from teenagers. Jay Friedman, a public health dentist who spent three decades fighting the practice, worked out that at least two-thirds of them were doing no harm whatsoever. The reasoning is an old one. Everybody's go eventually, so have the lot out young, the sound ones with the bad, before they cause trouble. Four at once, usually under a general anaesthetic, followed by a week of soup, ice packs and photographs of chipmunk cheeks. It is so routine that the teenager who keeps all four is the one who gets asked questions. In 2007 Friedman added it all up and called it a public health hazard. About 5 million Americans go under every year, at a cost of over $3 billion. They lose around 11 million days a year to pain, swelling and missed school or work. Tens of thousands are left with lifelong damage, many with a lip, chin or tongue that never gets its feeling back because the drill clipped a nerve. Most of the pain blamed on wisdom teeth, he found, was caused by the surgery. Then came the comparison his profession hated most. The share of wisdom teeth that ever turn nasty is about the same as the share of appendixes that turn into appendicitis, and nobody takes every teenager's appendix out just in case. By his estimate the average oral surgeon in America was making about half a million dollars a year from wisdom teeth. His colleagues called him a traitor. The following year the American Public Health Association came out against pulling healthy wisdom teeth. Britain had got there first. The very first ruling NICE ever issued, in 2000, told dentists to leave healthy wisdom teeth where they were. America carried on, and still does. Wisdom teeth arrive on schedule in every mouth. What has changed is the jaw they are meant to fit into. A jaw grows to the work a child's food gives it, and years of soft, sweet, mushy food build one too small for the teeth it was always going to grow. Impacted wisdom teeth are rare in skulls from before farming. In ours they are a rite of passage. The face shrank to fit the food, and the teeth that no longer fit the face come out at seventeen, as a precaution, at a profit. Every generation finds a new set of teeth to blame for the menu.

Walk into hospital with coeliac disease and they take the bread away. Walk in with a peanut allergy and they take the peanuts away. Walk in with a liver damaged by alcohol and they take the alcohol away. Walk in with lungs damaged by cigarettes and they take the cigarettes away. Walk in with type 2 diabetes, a body that can no longer cope with sugar, and they bring you breakfast: cornflakes, orange juice, white toast and a little pot of jam. Then the insulin trolley, to push down the sugar the breakfast put up. Then a carton of juice by the bed, in case the insulin pushes it too far. Then a line in your notes: poorly controlled. This is the disease they diagnose by making you drink 75 grams of glucose and watching your body fail to clear it. Every other patient on the ward is kept away from the thing that's hurting them. The diabetic gets it on a tray, three times a day, with a drug to clean up after it.