The heart attack was first described in a medical journal in 1912, and the man who described it had trouble finding a second case. Doctors had been opening chests for 300 years. They had dissected kings, paupers, drunks and the obese, and the blocked coronary artery was a rarity you wrote up. A young Boston cardiologist started practising in 1911. He later said he did not see his first heart attack patient until 1921, and then they came in a flood. By 1950 it was the biggest killer in the United States. By 1960, in Britain. Victorian England ate butter, dripping, suet, bacon and cream, and smoked like a chimney, and the coronary ward did not exist. The Masai lived on milk, meat and blood, and the doctors who went looking in the 1960s could not find heart disease among them. So what arrived between the dissecting rooms of 1900 and the coronary care units of 1960? Crisco launched in 1911. Cottonseed oil hardened into a block that looked like lard. Margarine followed it into every kitchen. By 1960 a quarter of American fat came out of a seed press that had not existed in 1900. The seed oil goes into your blood on the LDL particle. It is the part of the particle that oxidises. The oxidised particle is what the artery wall takes in. The cholesterol was in the butter for a thousand years and the artery stayed open. Then the fat changed, and a disease nobody had heard of became the way most people die. The guideline blames the butter. The butter has an alibi going back to the Bronze Age.

They attacked lard. We got Crisco, cottonseed oil hardened with hydrogen, made from what the cotton gin threw away. They attacked butter. We got margarine, out of the same vats as the soap, with the vitamins added back by law so it would pass for food. They attacked dripping. We got chips fried in oil that breaks down into aldehydes, the compounds a laboratory buys to damage a cell on purpose. They attacked whole milk. We got the skimmed, with the vitamins poured off in the cream and sold back to us separately. They attacked the egg yolk. We got egg whites in a carton, with the choline, the vitamin D and every fat-soluble nutrient left in the bin. They attacked sugar. We got aspartame, which keeps the craving running on an empty stomach and now carries a possible cancer grade from the WHO. They attacked breast milk. We got formula built on vegetable oil, mixed with whatever water the mother had, and a generation of babies in the poorest countries died of it. They attacked the stockpot. We got a cube of salt and palm fat with no bone, no marrow and no gelatine in it. They attacked wool. We got polyester, which is oil, which keeps the sweat in, and which melted into the skin of sailors on HMS Sheffield. They attacked leather. We got polyurethane shoes that crack in one winter and sit in landfill for 500. Now they are attacking beef. We are getting pea protein with eighteen ingredients, a cartoon cow on the box, and a third of the iron. The original came from a field and a kitchen. The replacement came from a refinery and a patent. Not one of the originals has ever been improved on. Every one of them has been replaced.

I'm going to say something the food industry has kept quiet for fifty years, and if this account goes dark you'll know why. The answer to nearly every question about what to eat is four beef patties with butter on top. What's a quick, healthy breakfast? Four patties and butter. What should I eat after the gym? Four patties and butter. What can I cook in ten minutes after work? Four patties and butter. What's a high-protein lunch that isn't a sad chicken salad? Four patties and butter. What can I afford this week? Four patties and butter. What will keep me full until dinner? Four patties and butter. That was dinner. What do I feed a teenager who is permanently starving? Six. And more butter. What about the bun? The bun was there to hold it while you walked. Sit down. What about vegetables? Put the butter where the vegetables were going to go. Isn't that a bit basic? It's ground steak and cream fat. People pay £30 for that under a French name. You can see why this has been suppressed. There's no cookbook in it, because it would be one page long. There's no app, no powder, no 12-week plan and no sequel. An entire industry of meal kits, protein bars and nutritionists with ring lights rests on you never finding out. I've said it now. If anyone asks, you heard it from a man who was last seen near a frying pan.