America schedules a candy holiday, a pie holiday, a cookie holiday and a boozer holiday back to back, then calls the illness that follows flu season. Four months of sugar, one month of coughing, and the official explanation is the weather.

Name a chronic disease the pharmaceutical industry has cured in your lifetime. Diabetes: managed. 100 years of insulin, and the count has gone up every year. Blood pressure: managed. For life. Cholesterol: managed. For life, from 40. Depression: managed. A third of the people on it have been on it for a decade. Reflux: managed. The leaflet says 8 weeks. The average is years. Asthma, arthritis, eczema, migraine, obesity: managed, managed, managed, managed, injected. Then in 2014 something slipped through. A drug that actually cured hepatitis C, in 12 weeks, for good. In 2018 Goldman Sachs wrote a note to its clients about it. The title was a question: is curing patients a sustainable business model? Their answer was no. The cure had shrunk the market. The hepatitis C business fell from $12 billion a year to under $4 billion, because the patients kept getting better and not coming back. The bank advised investors to look for conditions that are chronic, and treatments that are taken for life. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is an investment note, and it says the quiet part in a font. A cure is a one-off sale. A patient is an annuity, and the whole industry is priced on the annuity. Nobody is going to cure the thing you have, because the thing you have is their best product. But a plate can. That is why it is extreme.

Most people who fail on carnivore were never short of meat. They were short of fat, and the fix takes about a week. Your liver can only process so much protein, roughly a third of your calories. With carbs gone, the other two thirds has to be fat. There is no third option. Lean meat alone leaves you hungry, cold, tired and dreaming about bread. That's a fuel shortage, and it gets blamed on the diet. Aim for at least a gram of fat for every gram of protein. Most people feel best at one and a half. No cut gets there unaided, so add it: - Butter on every steak, a thick slice, while it rests - Tallow or dripping stirred through mince - Double cream in the pan juices - Egg yolks, runny, as a sauce - Bone marrow, roasted, eaten with a spoon - Suet, rendered, for cooking everything else - The fat cap, eaten, never trimmed You'll know it's working when you finish a meal and the idea of food simply leaves your head for six hours. If you're hungry two hours after eating, you didn't need more meat. You needed more butter.