Diane Jones

Women have been handed the plant version of every nutrient for fifty years and then told the tiredness is just being a woman. Told to eat spinach for iron. Spinach iron absorbs at about 2%. The iron in a steak absorbs at up to 35%. Told to take flax for the omega-3. The body turns a few percent of it into the fat the brain actually uses. A mackerel arrives with it done. Told to swap the milk for oat. The milk was where the iodine was, and the thyroid runs on iodine. Told to get B12 from nutritional yeast. Yeast has none until a factory sprays it on. Told to get protein from tofu, which has half what a lamb chop carries and none of the fat to use it. Told to cut the yolk for the cholesterol. The yolk was the choline, and the choline was the baby's brain. Told to go low fat in 1985 and to count calories in 1995, and the hunger that followed got a diagnosis of its own. Three women in ten on earth are anaemic. The advice for all three has been a leaf. Every substitution on that list took the animal off her plate and handed her the deficiency, and then handed her a label for the deficiency. Hashimoto's. Fibromyalgia. Chronic fatigue. Low mood. Perimenopause, arriving at thirty-eight. She was never short of a plant. She was short of a cow. Fifty years of being told to eat like a rabbit, and the fatigue filed under hormones.