Tina Turner

Testosterone is made from cholesterol. Oestrogen is made from cholesterol. Progesterone, the hormone that holds a pregnancy, is made from cholesterol. Cortisol, the hormone that gets you through a crisis, is made from cholesterol. Vitamin D is made from cholesterol, by sunlight, in your skin. The bile that digests your fat is made from cholesterol. Every cell in your body is wrapped in a membrane stiffened with cholesterol. Every nerve is insulated with myelin packed with cholesterol. Your brain is 2% of your body weight and holds about a quarter of your cholesterol. Breast milk is loaded with it, because a baby's brain can't be built without it. Most infant formula has almost none. Pregnancy raises it by up to half, because building a human takes a lot of it. Eat less of it and your liver simply makes more, because the body refuses to run without it. Then, in the late 1970s, we declared war on it. Around 8 million people in England now take a pill to lower it. That pill raises the risk of diabetes by about a tenth. Sperm counts have more than halved. Men's testosterone has been sliding about 1% a year, age for age. Antidepressant prescriptions in England have more than doubled since 2008. And in people over 70, the lowest cholesterol tracks with dying soonest. Reports from the front say the war is going well.

Constipation on carnivore means you've gone lean, and the cure is the thing the diet was supposed to be built on in the first place. Meat is almost entirely absorbed. There's very little left over to pass, so a carnivore going once a day or once every two days, comfortably, isn't constipated. That's what happens when food stops being mostly packaging. The bran that used to bulk everything out was never doing you a favour; it was a cargo you paid to carry through. The actual complaint, hard, dry, an effort, is a different thing, and it has one cause. Fat. Fat is what moves the gut. A fatty meal tells the gallbladder to empty, bile goes in, and bile is the body's own laxative, which is why a pound of lean steak sits like a brick and the same steak with the cap on and a knob of butter melting over it goes through like it was expected. Lean mince, chicken breast, egg whites and a tin of tuna is a plate with the plumbing turned off, and the person eating it blames the meat. So the fix is never fibre and never a sachet. It's the butter you were told to leave off, the 20% instead of the 5%, cream in the coffee, the fat cap eaten first. Within a day or two the problem has gone, and it stays gone as long as the plate shines. Which is the point. A diet of meat only works when the fat is on it. Take the fat off and you have a bodybuilder's cut with worse manners, and the gut is the first thing to file a complaint. Carnivore is high fat by definition. The bathroom is where people find that out.