J Jon

The year is 200 BC. In China, your classics teach that a barbarian is someone who does not eat grain. The Xiongnu live on meat and milk and prize strength above everything. Their boys learn to ride on sheep. They trap your emperor on a hill for seven days with 300,000 archers, and China pays them in silk and princesses for the next sixty years. The year is 9 AD. Your general thinks the Germans are men only in voice and limbs, savages to be tamed with Roman law. Caesar wrote that milk, cheese and meat make them enormous. Within four days 15,000 of you are dead, and your skulls are nailed to the trees. The year is 60 AD. Rome files the Britons as savages who sow no grain and live on milk and meat, yet British boys in Rome stand half a foot taller than the tallest Romans. You live in Londinium when Boudica arrives, a woman taller than any of you, and 70,000 die in three burning towns. The year is 449. Your historians call the Huns two-legged beasts, all thick necks and hard limbs, who warm half-raw meat under their thighs as they ride. Your emperor pays them 2,100 pounds of gold a year. At Attila's feast you eat off silver. He eats nothing but meat, off a wooden plate. The year is 1012. Your Church condemns the Danes as heathens who eat horse. Raised on beef and soured milk and led by Thorkell the Tall, they winter on your cattle and take 48,000 pounds of your silver. When the Archbishop of Canterbury refuses to be ransomed, they pelt him with ox bones and split his skull with an axe. The year is 1241. Your chroniclers call the Mongols monsters who drink blood and tear raw flesh. Raised on meat and mare's milk, they ride from the age of three. They destroy the army of Hungary in a single morning, and in 1258 the Tigris runs black with the ink of Baghdad's libraries. The year is 2026. You are taught that red meat causes cancer, that raw milk is a danger to the public, and that anyone living on steak and butter is a caveman. For two thousand years the civilised have been taught to sneer at the people raised on meat and milk, and for two thousand years those people have stood taller and lived freer than the ones sneering. Which side would you rather be on?

For a thousand years Inuit children were raised on everything the guidelines tell parents to limit, and tooth decay was almost unknown among them until 1950. Nothing grows on the sea ice. There were no greens to finish and nobody to bribe. When the fish came in, the heads and tails went to the children. At a seal kill they crowded in for the liver, eaten raw and still warm. They chewed frozen fish shaved thin, chewed muktuk with the blubber still on, and cracked caribou bones for the marrow. After a good hunt the whole camp ate until it could not move, children included. Explorers watched them gnaw a whole fish the way an American eats corn on the cob. No fruit. No grains. No juice. And no scurvy, because the vitamin C was in the raw liver. Stefansson lived among them for years and reported that their teeth were perfect wherever they had not learned to eat like white men. Then the store arrived and the plate began to look like the guidelines. Bread, crackers, cereal and juice, with sugar and seed oil riding along. 85% of Inuit children in Nunavut aged three to five now have tooth decay. They go under general anaesthetic for it at nearly twelve times the rate of children in Ontario. The territory's only hospital gives a quarter of its operating theatre time to dental surgery, most of it on children. Some of the children still eat the old way, and in 2007 researchers measured what it does for them. Most of the 388 preschoolers surveyed met their needs for many nutrients without eating the servings in Canada's food guide. The more seal, caribou and fish a child ate, the more iron, zinc, vitamin A and vitamin D they got. Four in five of the biggest country food eaters met their vitamin D needs, against two in five of the children eating none. The best fed children in the Arctic were the ones eating furthest from the guide. The researchers' advice included more fruit and vegetables. Flown in by plane, at Arctic prices, to improve on the seal.