Douglas Schorr

“Vegetables are your key to health.” 100 years later, my family pays the price.

In 1932, a scrawny 15-year-old—my dad—sat glaring at a plate of limp vegetables in a dusty South African kitchen. For three days, he’d refused to eat until his widowed aunt slapped the same plate down and snapped, “You’ll eat what I serve. Non-meat foods are the road to health.” Hunger won. He choked it down.

That plate started a century-long dig—a food experiment gone sour. I’m living proof, and my grandchildren are the final tally.

World War II hit. Dad joined the British Royal Navy, surviving on tinned slop and packet mush—carbs and sugar in disguise. Post-war, we settled in Southern Rhodesia. He turned our Bulawayo backyard into a vegetable haven; folks came to marvel. Our main meal held steady at “one meat, two veg,” but maize-meal breakfasts, towering bread lunches, and sugar-drenched everything—rhubarb, spinach, guavas, strawberries—snuck in. Desserts, ice cream, and sugar balls for “energy” were cheered. In Umtali, market gardeners took over; no need for Dad’s plot.

By 1980, America’s health gurus echoed Aunt Margaret: vegetables, carbs, and fruits were holy; meat, fat, eggs, butter, salt, and milk were sin. Raising my daughter, I clapped as she toddled into the Standard American Diet—SAD. “Good girl!” I’d say, handing her a sugared fruit sucker. I bought the gospel.

Then Mom got breast cancer at 62. Specialists said longer lives mean more problems, detection’s just better now. No word on her pain—or how my great-granny (99) and grannies (92, 94) died peacefully in sleep. Mom beat it once, but cancer returned—lungs, eyes, bones. Doctors pushed carb-heavy breakfasts, fruit drinks, nuts, grains, no eggs or meat. Three brutal years later, at 70, she was gone. Dad, a onetime smoker, had lung issues, but gut bleeding and a rapid growth that came out of nowhere killed him at 86 in a week. Friends and family their age died hard too.

A hundred years from that veggie standoff, I’m a lab rat of this fuel flop. My kids and grandkids—your generation—bear the scars: autoimmune betrayals, ADHD, autism hints, HIV’s tighter grip. Cancer clubs, addiction groups, and celiac ads scream it. I’m damn sure it’s the food.

How? The science that we’re built as carnivores—meat-eaters was always there but buried. Libraries were scarce in the 30s, newspapers thin, and the church dodged it, tying lamb to the Garden of Eden’s myth. Memes linked red meat to vice in men. Fifty years back, America’s government silenced dissent; the world tagged along even as year by year they presented their own alarming rising ill-health statistics. Then the internet, podcasts, YouTube, and X cracked it open. Research from the last 20 years ties sugars to global health horrors. Old studies from the ’80s and ’90s, hidden by food and drug giants, resurface: they lied.

Carbs and sugars, generation after generation, shred immunity, seed disease—autism, ADHD, crumbling HIV defences. Good fuel builds; bad rots. By the fourth generation, cravings are bred in—gimme-gimme. You’re raising plagues.

Take my history. Strong black Africans I knew as a kid faded by 1980. I had studied their culture but missed how their shift from meat to carbs in 1900 trashed their health by the ’70s. Under the settlers, average lifespan jumped from 24 to 64, so I swallowed the “old age diseases” line. I never asked how the old timers I sat with who regaled me with stories of being a Lobengula warrior hit 90, sharp as ever. If I’d understood, I’d have written HIV-AIDS: Was Dr. Beetroot Almost Right? decades sooner. Even as I envied bush animals—graceful, powerful, perfectly fuelled—I didn’t see it. And back in the city, my doctor balked at my egg, salt, butter, and 30% meat plate. Then I went full SAD.

At 70, I was wrecked—16 years sober, but SAD and exercise didn’t save me. Docs praised me for outlasting pals and my family said it was time for a will. It was a wakeup call: I went carnivore—meat, fat, eggs, butter, salt, some dairy, nothing else. A year later: Dead Man Roars Back to Life. It wasn’t a miracle. Just biology.

I told my kids and grandchildren: Our guts crave animal fuel. They laugh and rage, and they’re backed by governments, food lords, medics, drug pushers, and priests. We advocates of “fuel right” face a worldwide GDP growth and profit at all costs machine dwarfing the Military-Industrial Complex. They sold plants over prey; we’re the wreckage.

But I’d fed them the lie too, and in my ignorance I’d cheered their sugar highs. Guilt eats me, but I’m proud I fought back to Dad’s table—15, resisting the veggie shove—with science, not just grit.

Here’s the tale, kids: a century of wrong plates, a family duped by “health,” a world profiting off the fallout. Skip the TV, government, woke babble. Your gut’s no garden—it’s a hunter’s factory. Feed it right, or it’ll devour you.