Jonh Nich0lson - The Meat F1x: How a Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me!

I unwrapped a thick cut of grass-fed, organically reared fillet of beef, seasoned it, put it into a hot pan and fried it in a mixture of organic butter and olive oil for three minutes on each side. As the kitchen filled with the smell of caramelised meat my digestive juices ached for the coming feast.

I let it rest for five minutes and then cut into it. It was perfectly medium rare. Rich, tender and intensely savoury, I relished the juicy meat and the delicious, elemental combination of fat and blood.

It was mind-blowingly flavourful; a complete meal in itself that seemed to occupy all my taste buds and senses.

Just two weeks ago this would have been the least likely thing I might have done because two weeks ago I was still a vegetarian. Id been a vegetarian for twenty-six years. I liked being a vegetarian. It was, quite literally, who I was. For most of those years Id actually been a vegan, eschewing all animal-derived foods. Oh yeah, thats right. One of those.

Dont worry, this isnt a book about vegetarianism. No dreadlocks or earnest lectures about animal rights here. Sod that. There are more important issues to consider, more specifically what is and isnt healthy eating, and how we got to this twenty-first century state of paranoia over whats best to put into our meat-hole. The thing is, I wasnt just a non-meat eater, I was Mr Wholefood: brown rice, healthy vegetable oils, lentils, beans, tofu, nuts, fruit and vegetables. All the stuff the doctors now tell you to eat, well, I started hoovering that all up way back in the mid 1980s when it had only just become part of the healthy eating advice and when very few outside of the small community of hairy, bearded, dope-smoking, wholefood-eating New-Agers had even heard of it.

So for twenty-six years I ate no cholesterol, no animal fats and ate polyunsaturated and wholegrain everything. Go to your local surgery and hand over my food diary and theyd give you a gold star. Your medical man or woman with the stethoscope and that nodding-without- really-listening , slightly condescending attitude, has been advising everyone to base their diet on starchy foods, eat a lot less saturated fat, a lot less animal fat, a lot less cholesterol, a lot less sugar and a lot less red meat for years. Its virtually a religion now.

Look at the Eat Well plate on the NHS website and youll see the official propaganda all based around these basic principles.

I really was a walking advert for healthy eating. You couldnt eat more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff than me. If there was a competition for healthy eating, Id have won hands down and I was told as much by doctors and nutritionists year after year.

All well and good, but there was trouble in paradise. I was ill. Really ill. And Id been ill for the majority of those twenty-six years.

For years I had lived with what would come to be known as IBS: Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Starting back in 1993 as a vague feeling of digestive discomfort, it escalated to the point where every meal would leave me feeling like I had lead weights in my gut, my belly bloated and distended and my digestive tract in revolt in the most dramatic and unpleasant way. If you had a cruel sense of humour, you could say I was a dirty protest waiting to happen.

Id test the sewage systems capacity by passing out vast slurries of burning effluent which left me feeling sweaty and exhausted. This would happen up to seven or eight times a day during the worst period. It was like this to a greater or lesser degree after every meal, every day, every month, every year, on and on and on for seventeen years. Yeah, how dya like me now?

Whats more, slowly but surely, year after year, I kept putting weight on until I was clinically obese. I peaked in 2008 at fourteen and a half stone, which, for a 5 foot 10 inch tall, medium-build lad, is a lot of blubber to wear. Not big enough to make a freak show but big enough to be very unhealthy. I waddled around, sweating and short of breath when required to do anything slightly physical. I had always been an active sort of bloke. Not exactly sporty Im hardly the alpha male type who relishes that kind of masculine bonding. My idea of fun is not holding another mans scrotum in a rugby scrum under the pretence it is a sport. Nonetheless, I was a frequent hiker, walker and swimmer, or at least I had been until the weight began to wrap its fatty tentacles around me.

The bad news didnt stop at being fat. By the time I was forty, I had very, very high cholesterol: a Christ-that- will-kill -you-early reading of 9.2. As my dad had keeled over with a heart attack aged sixty-five, I was put on the new statin drug Atorvastatin. Forty milligrams a day for the rest of my life. Welcome to decrepitude, Johnny. Because it wasnt just the IBS and the sky-high cholesterol; in many other ways I was slowly falling apart. The healthy eating thing wasnt working out well at all. I was suffering from chronic acid reflux; I was always tired and needed to take half an hour naps every afternoon. I suffered from headaches almost every day. I ate paracetamol and Rennies like they were sweets and, oh yeah, my eyesight was failing as well.

Jesus Christ, I thought, how the feck did this happen? It wasnt as if I was an old bloke. I had the low sugar, low-fat, high-fibre, carb-rich, wholegrain, vegetable-based diet that all the health advice had recommended with increasing fervour over the years. I should have been healthy, shouldnt I? Yes, I bloody well should have been but the fact was I had started to fall apart in my early thirties and by my mid forties I was, what the medical establishment would call, totally knackered, son.

And then, suddenly, it all changed when I stuffed my face with some good old fashioned meaty, beaty, big and bouncy products of slaughter, dripping in blood. Bye bye Mr Soya, hello dead sentient creatures.

Twenty-four hours after eating meat all my IBS symptoms had gone! Bloody hell. What was this new voodoo? Had eating animal flesh lifted some sort of hex that had been put on me?

As I began eating meat, I stopped eating high-load carbohydrates such as potatoes and wheat. I cut out all vegetable oils except olive, ate lots of lard, beef dripping, butter, cream and full-fat milk. I ate the fat on chops, the fat on meat, chicken skin, crackling on pork; I ate red meat four or five times a week. Basically I ate a lot of everything that were told not to eat at all, or only in strict moderation.

In some aspects, it was a diet that my grandparents, born at the end of the nineteenth century, would have known was nutritious and healthy, not because they had been told so by their doctors, by New-Age diet gurus, by freaky-looking people in white coats on the telly or by any other hysterical media outlet, but because they knew previous generations had thrived on it and that they thrived on it themselves.

Today a diet full of saturated fat, red meat, cream and full-fat milk is considered to be a heart attack waiting to happen. Does that come with a defibrillator? Ha ha bloody ha. It is not recommended at all, indeed, my and your doctors will tell you not to indulge in that type of diet. Ive been amazed and disgusted. Ive wanted to scream in their faces, Can you see the real me, doctor? Partly because I love The Who but mainly because when it came to medical attention, I ran into a brick wall for seventeen years. They had no solutions to my ill health but they still tell me my solution is wrong. This simple and 100 per cent effective remedy was not in any way what the doctor ordered, indeed, the doctor hadnt ordered anything. The doctor hadnt had a bloody clue what to do about it and had pretty much given up. Well done. Thank you and good night. Well, bollocks to them and their idiot ideas because the effect of this new, old-fashioned diet was virtually instant and amazing.