The Meat Fix

Book excerpt: For twenty-six years, John Nicholson was a vegetarian. No meat, no fish, no guilt. He was a walking advert for healthy eating. Brown rice, fruit, vegetables, low fat and low cholesterol - in the battle of good food versus bad, he should have been on the winning side. But the opposite was true: his diet was making him ill. Really ill. Joint pain? Tick. Exhaustion? Tick. Chronic IBS and piles? Tick, tick. Not to mention the fat belly and the sky-high cholesterol. His mind may have forgotten its taste for flesh and blood but had his body? Tired of being sick, John decided to do the unthinkable: eat meat. The results were spectacular. Twenty-four hours later, he felt better. After forty-eight hours he was fighting fit. Twelve months on, he had become a new person. He was first shocked, then delighted, then damn angry. The Meat Fix charts one man's journey to the top of the food chain, uncovering an alternate universe of research condemning everything we think we know about healthy eating as little more than illusion, guesswork and marketing. The body is a temple - but, as John Nicholson discovered, we may have forgotten how to worship it.