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Japan is the poster child for plant-based longevity. Frisk it, and an animal falls out of every pocket. Breakfast is tamago kake gohan: a raw egg cracked over hot rice and stirred till the bowl turns gold. Japan eats more eggs a head than almost anyone alive, around 320 a year, second only to Mexico. Nearly one a day, raw, on the rice you were told was the healthy part. The famous stuff is worse. Sushi is raw fish. Ramen is a bowl of pork-bone broth wearing noodles. A single tuna at the New Year auction has sold for over a million pounds. Not the behaviour of a people who treat meat as a garnish. Even the vegetables are in on it. The greens, the miso, the broth under everything are built on dashi, a stock of dried tuna and sardines. The plants were swimming in fish before they hit the plate. And the elderly filling those longevity charts grew up on whale, ladled into post-war school lunches at a third the price of pork until about 1980. The scoreboard: - Eggs: around 320 a head a year, second in the world - Fish: the national dish is raw, the stock is in everything - Vegetables: mostly simmered in tuna and sardine broth - Meat: overtook fish outright in 2011 and has stayed ahead - Protein: the total has barely moved in decades, it just walked from one animal to another Japan eats plants. It also opens the day with a raw egg, wraps its rice round raw fish, cooks the greens in tuna, and built its oldest generation on whale. Call that plant-based if you like. The wellness industry does, then crops the whale out of the photo.

The experts would rather you didn't know this, so naturally I'm going to tell you. A stack of bunless burgers from McDonald's is one of the cleanest meals you can get your hands on. The patties are 100% beef. No fillers, no binders, no additives, whatever people insist on telling you. Cooked on a hot plate in their own fat, not a drop of seed oil in sight. Cheese is up to you. The point is what you leave behind: the bun, the sauce, the fizzy drink. The carbs, the seed oils and the sugar, gone in a single order. What's left is beef and fat, the two things you actually need, for under a tenner on any high street in the country. Handy for when you're on the move and nowhere near a kitchen. The gatekeepers would have you believe eating well takes a farmers' market and forty quid. It takes a drive-thru and the confidence to say no bun.

Your body knows how to digest red meat. It has been doing it for two million years. Your body knows how to use saturated fat. Every cell membrane is partly made of it. Your body knows how to process cholesterol. It makes its own when you don't eat enough. Your body knows how to use sunlight. It converts it to a hormone your immune system requires. Your body knows how to fast. It has a metabolic mode specifically designed for it. Your body knows how to sleep without medication. It has been doing so without assistance for the entirety of human history. Your body does not know what to do with rapeseed oil, maltodextrin, carrageenan, potassium bromate, polysorbate 80, or tertiary butylhydroquinone. We are feeding it the second list and wondering why it's struggling.